The last week for me has been fun in open source land outside of me getting two of my wisdom teeth pulled out of my face. On the bright side, I have some pain killers now and also, two notable things happened. First it was nice to finally graduate Parquet out of the Apache Incubator:
The Apache Software Foundation Announces @ApacheParquet as a Top-Level Project http://t.co/aB4LWEz6jr #Apache #storage @Hadoop #ecosystem
— Apache – The ASF (@TheASF) April 27, 2015
It’s been a little over two years since we (Twitter) announced the open source columnar storage project with Cloudera. It’s a great feeling to see a plan come together and see this project grow over the years with 60+ contributors while hitting the notable achievement of graduating out of the Apache incubator gauntlet. If there’s any lesson here for me, it’s much easier to build an open source community when you do it an independent fashion with at least someone else in the beginning (thanks Cloudera).
Another notable thing that happened was that Apple finally announced that they are using Mesos to power Siri’s massive infrastructure.
nice to be at the Bay Area Mesos meet up tonight and see Apple announce that Siri is powered by @ApacheMesos pic.twitter.com/kEphLs7Rfk
— Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) April 23, 2015
In my experience of building open source communities, there are usually your public adopters and private adopters. There are companies that wish to remain private about the software they use at times and that’s fine, it’s understandable when it can be viewed as a competitive advantage. The challenge is how you work with these private adopters when they use an open source project of yours while wanting to collaborate behind the scenes.
Anyways, it’s a great feeling to see Apple opening up a bit about their infrastructure and open source usage after working with them for awhile. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come from them. Also, it would be nice if Apple just updated Siri so when you ask what Mesos is, it replies with a funny response and proclaims her love of open source infrastructure technology.
Overall, it’s been a great last week.