
The Apache Cassandra battle highlights major problem with open source projects - CrankyBear
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-battle-for-apache-cassandra-highlights-major-problem-with-open-source-projects/
======
marktangotango
This is a curiously vague article. Apparently there were issues with
Cassandra's project leadership not addressing trademark issues, causing the
Apache Software Foundation to remove Datastax from their leadership position.
Um, ok? The author here seems to be sowing FUD about the future of the
project, and by relation, all ASF projects. Anyone with knowledge of this
situation care to chime in?

~~~
_benedict
This is not quite what happened.

Datastax employees were the controlling influence on the PMC, and the PMC
failed to police copyright issues (including with Datastax marketing
materials), mostly because they did not know this was their duty (and
partially, in at least the case of some individuals, because they did not have
any desire to participate in this duty on a volunteer basis).

They were also seen to have poorly nurtured other involvement from the wider
community.

To some greater or lesser extent these charges were valid, and the community
(not just the board, at least on the non-trademark issues) felt improvements
would be welcome. But certain members of the board behaved in what _appeared_
to be a very hostile and childish manner, by threatening Datastax with removal
of every employee from the project. (I've been in heated arguments with these
individuals for their behaviour, and I'll note they disavow any intended
hostility, though do not disavow their actions)

The ASF did _not_ remove Datastax from anything, although they were I think
involved in Jonathan Ellis (Datastax CTO) being replaced as chair.

Datastax recently posted that they were planning to put much of their new
feature development into their commercial version. They claim this all had
nothing to do with stepping back from the project, but in all likelihood this
is a "rising above it" PR position. That said, it probably is a good business
decision, and may have happened sooner or later anyway.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
Reading this apparently biased article in favor of DataStax, it seems like no
one is coming out of this situation looking good. I personally believe that
DataStax may have overplayed their hand here since several of the high-powered
Silicon Valley companies use Cassandra. If DS' commercial offerings aren't up
to snuff, one of them will undoubtedly step in to help steer development of
the source in a direction that benefits them.

Cassandra is one of the better big datastore offerings out there, and the doom
and gloom narrative played by the article seems a bit disingenuous to say the
least.

~~~
_benedict
I honestly don't see how companies, that aren't monetising Cassandra,
providing resources to the project is a major risk to Datastax. This only
improves Cassandra's mindshare in (and share of) the market, while leaving
them to corner the large corporate client base as well as target their
engineering efforts on things that can directly yield revenue.

Although I think you overestimate the inclination and ability of these
corporations to invest - at least to date, only Apple has demonstrated any
capacity or willingness to do so, and they are fairly slow about it. Their
lawyers and antiquated deployments lead to very few (but quite big)
improvements, and so far all of them have needed help from Datastax to be
incorporated. This is despite a largeish team of people with direct experience
of participating in the project; no other SV company has any such employee at
present, and bootstrapping such a team would be non-trivial. Instaclustr
claims they intend to do this, but it remains to be seen how successful they
will be.

~~~
jjirsa
I've committed a few Instaclustr patches in the past month - they weren't
huge, but they exist (and I appreciate that).

Also some patches coming out of FB/Instagram (with a new committer as well).

------
micah_chatt
I'm curious what impact this will have on other ASF projects, specifically
Mesos. A number of the features required for a smaller or medium sized
organization to actually use Mesos in production are only available in
Mesosphere's DC/OS. And whenever those shortcomings are brought up, the answer
is "oh well if you really need authentication beyond htpasswd, you can pay for
DCOS." Like the article hinted at, I hope the ASF tries to do more to work
with vendors to help OSS side of projects flourish rather than just be lip
service.

~~~
vorg
> I'm curious what impact this will have on other ASF projects

It might cause those committing the code, building the tests, and writing the
doco for other ASF projects to question whether their project is being justly
managed. I only watch one ASF project, Apache Groovy, and it has a similar
imbalance between fluff managers and grunt workers.

Although all 9 members of its PMC are committers, only 4 of them have ever
committed code since Groovy joined the ASF via its incubator 18 months ago.
The other 5 (i.e. chairperson Guillaume Laforge, Jim Jagielski, Roman
Shaposhnik, Konstantin Boudnik, and Andrew Bayer) are all committers but have
_never_ committed any code in that time. I can't find any other technical
contributions from them either. All 5 are also ASF members, whereas only 2 of
the other 4 PMC members who do grunt work are ASF members.

There's 10 other committers in Groovy, most of whom are more active
contributors than those 5 I named, and in my view have far more merit to be on
the PMC than them. OCI, the company doing Grails consulting, a few weeks ago
enlisted an active PMC member (Paul King) as an OCI consultant "to coordinate
contributions to Groovy". If Groovy's governance at ASF doesn't radically
change fast to give PMC voices to the people doing the actual work instead of
those ASF politicians, OCI might tap into the discontent and "take over" in
similar style to DataStax, or even fork it like LibreOffice.

~~~
jjirsa
Sometimes members of the PMC are on the PMC to help committers do things in
the Apache way - Jim (in particular) is a member of the ASF board and likely
mentored the project early on (I'd go check to be certain but I'm mobile at
the moment).

~~~
vorg
Because it's 18 months since Groovy joined the incubator and 12 months since
it became a top-level project, it could be time Jim Jagielski and all ASF
members not actually contributing to Groovy leave its PMC so that the
proportion of those actually committing code and similar goes up from its
present 44%. OCI is ready to pounce if they don't.

~~~
jjirsa
The PMC can (should) invite active members of the community - there's no fixed
size, the PMC can add members at any time.

There's no need to worry about ratios of people committing code - the PMC is
about guidance, not about writing code.

~~~
vorg
I believe Apache Groovy implementations should be led by their technical
people, so its PMC should only have people in it who can and do code, test,
and write docs. Groovy's past problems have been due to managerial sorts
running things.

------
grizzles
I have a feeling Apache leadership probably did the right thing here. It is
after all, their brand. Recently there have been some strange things happening
with the Cassandra project. Hopefully not another rethinkdb.

For example, a longstanding Cassandra bug makes it hard to build the database
from source if you have a modern version of maven installed. Though Cassandra
builds itself using ant (why?), simply having modern maven installed is a big
enough incompatibility to break the build. That's weird.

Another recent weirdness is that Cassandra was shipping a non working command
interpreter (cqlsh) for at least 3+ months as recently as a few months ago.
That's now fixed in v3.9. I have to admit, the first thing I thought upon
seeing that brokenness shipping in the binary distribution was - Is this
because Datastax needs more sales?

~~~
jjirsa
Can you link the jira for the mvn/ant bug? Or, if it doesn't exist, can you
create it?

------
johan_larson
Sharing is hard. Nobody making money can work. Many people making money can
work. Just one party making money, that's a mofo.

Full disclosure: I work for Couchbase, and our management tends to describe
DataStax as a key competitor.

------
helper
I've been a Cassandra user for 5+ years and have been watching the drama
unfold on the mailing lists the past few months. I have no business
relationship with Datastax and have never paid them money for any of their
services (except for attending the Datastax sponsored Cassandra Summit a
number of times). I'm not a committer but I have been an active member of the
community opening bugs, participating in the user mailing list, Stack
Overflow, maintaining a client library, etc.

From my perspective it seemed like the ASF board members had already prejudged
the situation before engaging in any public discussions on the Cassandra
mailing lists. The first interaction was about why Cassandra doesn't ship with
its own client drivers[1]. The board member believed this to be a sign of
Datastax "controlling" Cassandra because they have their own high quality open
source client libraries. As a user and a former maintainer of a client
library, this theory came off as completely ridiculous. The project has never
shipped a production ready client driver in tree. It is simply impractical to
be able to do that for all the languages for which there are drivers. I've got
code in three different languages in production right now and none of them use
Datastax drivers. If you read that mailing list thread, that is basically what
everyone says on it (including the new Casssandra PMC chair), and yet the
conclusion that the ASF board member takes away is that Datastax is
controlling the project by having out of tree open source client libraries.

That ASF board member also got upset when a question on the mailing list was
answered with a link to Datastax hosted documentation[2]. Again this seemed
like an overreaction from the board member over a fixable problem as
justification for a Cassandra shakeup.

Then recently there was a new wave of threads about Apache and Datastax[3][4].
Both sides come off looking pretty bad in these threads. Its clear that at
this point a lot of people in the Cassandra community have negative feelings
toward certain members of the ASF board. It also seems like those board
members have become very defensive about what has transpired. Fortunately
people have started to calm down and there has been a few reasonable emails
from both sides.

From my perspective the ASF came off looking like they care more about the
Apache trademarks than they do about the health of the community. I do believe
there were some actual issues that were identified as places for improvement
for the Cassandra community, but I don't think it was necessary to come in
wielding a sledge hammer. It seems that the Cassandra board was not given an
opportunity to fix the issues (mostly by increasing the number of project
committers) before the board forced the changes. This has resulted in a lot of
hurt feelings and a general sense of distrust between the Cassandra community
and the ASF.

All that being said, I'm not particularly worried about Cassandra's future. I
was sad to see Jonathan Ellis leave as the chair person, but hearing that Nate
McCall was stepping into that position put a lot of my concerns at ease.

I hope that the Datastax folks know that the community appreciates all that
they have contributed to the open source Cassandra project, even if the ASF
doesn't.

[1]:
[https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/72a884fa8f35cbed23135c8...](https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/72a884fa8f35cbed23135c8c771da06076d87a5a20ff5a7cd5d24001@%3Cdev.cassandra.apache.org%3E)

[2]: [http://www.mail-
archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg0914...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg09143.html)

[3]: [http://www.mail-
archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg1003...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg10037.html)

[4]: [http://www.mail-
archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg1002...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg10020.html)

~~~
jjirsa
I feel like I've sent more than enough emails on this subject already, so
rather than nit pick tiny things in your comment with which I disagree, I'm
just going to say that I agree with your closing sentence.

~~~
helper
Thank you for your general civility on the lists. I'm glad that you are on the
PMC.

------
qwertyuiop924
This isn't a "major problem with open source projects," it's a problem with
the governence model of one specific project, and a conflict between the ASF
and the company holding a controlling majority on the board.

Other than "governance is hard and politics sucks," I'm not sure what the
"major problem" actually _is_

~~~
jack9
> a problem with the governence model of one specific project,

I think multiple (not many, nor all) OS projects have a leading vendor
supporting the codebase in various ways. For poorly adopted or niche OS
projects, hardware, computer languages, etc, this can be a deathstroke to the
project.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Yeah, but they were saying it was a major flaw with all of OS. It isn't. In
fact, if your project isn't incredibly popular, this likely won't effect you.

------
winteriscoming
I haven't followed this specific Datastax vs ASF discussion, but have seen
similar battles played out in recent years between some popular projects and
ASF and even ESF (Eclipse foundation vs Vert.x project for example)

Does anyone here know what value do these foundations bring to projects, in
this day of cloud hosting/computing that make these foundations worth for the
projects?

------
jcoffland
Yes Open-Source projects can have political issues too. I don't see how this
is any different than the politics of closed source software. Why the author
wants to disparage Open-Source is beyond me.

