Merit earns recognition and trust from within community
Contributors represent themselves, not the company they work for
Community over code
Healthy community lasts longer than any individual
Decisions made by consensus, not by force
Transparency
Mailing lists (dev, user, commit) are the public records of all Apache interactions.
“If it didn’t happen in lists, it didn’t happen”
Importance of a Healthy Apache Community for Confluent
A healthy Apache community
Provides more resources for design, development, reviewing, testing, etc.
Helps accelerate market adoption of the software
Enables continuous growth of the software
Confluent are committed to ensuring a successful relationship between Confluent and the ASF and helping contribute to a robust Apache community
Best Practices
Make sure all technical discussion about Apache projects stays in public mailing lists
Comments in JIRA and pull requests (PR) are already reflected in mailing lists
Equal and constructive participation
Your seniority at Confluent doesn’t translate to more voice in Apache
Be patient and professional even when others don’t
Be constructive with feedback
Be positive when receiving feedback for yourself too
Avoid group thinking
Confluent may not always have the best ideas
Healthy debate is a good thing: feel free to take a different position to your co-workers on the public mailing lists
Thorough discussion
Avoid opening a jira, submitting a jira and a PR, and committing them all in 5 mins. Leave enough time for discussions/reviews to complete.
Don’t put Confluent specific stuff in Apache documents or landing pages
No documentation in Apache Kafka should point to a link to Confluent
Don’t share Confluent customer names or information in Apache (e.g. when attaching logs to a jira, make sure customer-specific info such as machine hostnames are obfuscated)
Avoid customer-specific terminologies or use cases in feature proposals
Invest time in the community
Answer questions from the mailing list
Create opportunities for new contributors
Review KIP/PR from non-Confluent contributors
PMC members have more responsibilities
Promote new committer/PMC members regardless of their affiliation
Be proactive in protecting ASF marks, especially if Confluent is the violator. If the issue takes time to resolve, inform the PMC first.
If you are going to talk about Apache projects in public, follow the trademark guidelines
If you are still not sure if something meets the ASF spirit, ask one of the Kafka PMC members