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Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:30:50 -0800
From: Paul Querna <chip@force-elite.com>
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To: general@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: [Proposal] Helenus - a Cassandra fork
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Roland Weber wrote:
> Hello Ian,
> 
>> I'd like to propose a fork of the cassandra project. Since it was
>> initially released by FaceBook, It hasn't really grown an active
>> community around it.
>> [...]
>> Several people who plan to use the project in their companies have
>> banded together and want to fork the project so that they keep the
>> project alive, and build a community around it to grow it.
>>
>> I suggested we do this on the incubator, as it has experience building
>> communities around code.
> 
> There seem to be good reasons for attempting a fork of the project.
> However, my gut feeling says that this is a very political thing and
> should better be started on neutral ground (from an Apache perspective).
> 
> Apache is a home for voluntary contributions. If Facebook is the
> original source of the codebase, and they don't support the move here
> (for example by signing a software grant), then the fork should not
> be initiated here.

No, Apache is for individuals who are part of community that want to do 
*something*.

I don't care what "facebook" as a company does or doesn't want to do 
with the code, its open source, and the right to fork is there.

As long as we can create a good community for it, I don't have any 
objections to forking this project, or any project.

> I'm not sure how a later move to Apache would be handled. We expect
> incoming projects to get approval from all major contributors to their
> codebase, if feasible.

I don't think it matters.  We have had lots of overlapping projects 
before, and generally in the long run, one of them turns out better, and 
the community moves over to it.

There isn't any wrong with with projects dying in the long run either, 
it lets different groups of developers take different approaches.

If someone wanted to fork httpd for example, I would ridicule them at 
first, but if they could find 5-10 people to support it in the 
community, then I believe we should let it continue, even as an ASF 
project, and who knows, maybe the mythical Waka server will end up doing 
exactly this.

-Paul


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