Hi, thank you (and the PMC) for the initiative on such a community effort. Are there already projects expected/known to move to such an organization? I think it would make sense to have at least a couple projects lined up so the org doesn't start out empty.
Best Ingo On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 8:43 AM Becket Qin <becket....@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Flink devs, > > Recently we had some discussion in the Flink PMC about creating a public > open GitHub organization to host the code repo of some Flink ecosystem > projects. Instead of the Flink PMC doing this, we found that it is more > suitable for someone in the Flink community to do this on their personal > behalf. So here I would love to see if people would be interested in coming > together to help create and maintain this GitHub organization as a > community effort. > > *** Motivation* > > Currently, usually an ecosystem project is hosted in a company's GitHub > repo. However, this does not always work well for those who want to > collaborate on the projects.. > > 1. Some employers may have concerns if their employees contribute code > to another company's repo. Instead, they would rather fork and develop > in > their own repo. This results in split efforts instead of joint force to > develop the project. > 2. Sometimes a company's policy disallows granting repo permissions to > external contributors. > 3. Sometimes a company does not have a GitHub repo and is also not > willing to open source a project in a personal repo. > > Therefore a public open GitHub organization would provide a *neutral* place > helpful to facilitate the sharing and collaboration on the Flink ecosystem > projects for developers in these situations. > > *** How does it work?* > > 1. The public ecosystem GitHub org would be created and maintained by a > few volunteers. > 2. The volunteers who maintain the org are only responsible for creating > and deleting the individual project code repositories upon the requests > from the project owners. > 3. When someone wants to put a Flink ecosystem project in this > organization, a new GitHub repo will be created to host that project. > 4. The owners of each individual project will maintain the code repo of > that project, including merging PRs, granting commit permissions to > other > contributors, publishing releases, etc. > > *Note that this open GitHub org is NOT affiliated with ASF or the Apache > Flink project, although the volunteers who maintain the org may be Flink > committers or PMC members.* > > *** What's next* > If people find the public GitHub org for the ecosystem projects useful, we > will do the following: > > 1. Create the org together with the volunteers helping maintain the org. > (PMC permission is required if the org name contains "Flink", which is > likely). > 2. Welcome people to put their projects in the org as they see fit. > 3. Link the projects to flink-packages.org > > > To give some additional context, the following questions were raised and > answered in the earlier PMC discussion. > *** Why not host the projects in Apache?* > One suggestion brought up was asking the ecosystem project owners to > contribute their projects to Apache, either to an existing project such as > Apache Bahir, or through the incubator. > > The ASF is a great place to host organization neutral projects. However, > being a part of an Apache project has a high standard and demands long term > commitments. People also have to be committers, use jira, mailing lists. > The projects might also have to go through incubation which is even more > involved. > > Some of the ecosystem projects might not be ready to become a part of > Apache in some cases. The project may still be in the starting stage and > people don't know if it will last. Some of the projects may want more > flexible coordination, etc. > > Therefore, an open GitHub organization would solve the issues mentioned in > the motivation with the least restrictions. > > *** The relationship with flink-packages.org <http://flink-packages.org>* > > As people may already know that we have a flink-packages.org website > listing the Flink ecosystem projects so users can easily find them. One > reasonable question is how the new open GitHub org relates to the website. > > While flink-package.org aims to connect the project developers to the end > users, the GitHub org focuses on helping with the collaboration between > developers of the projects. The projects in the GitHub org will be linked > to and listed on the website. > > Thanks, > > Jiangjie (Becket) Qin >
