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Comment by ahl | Hacker News Reader

@dlurton since you seem to be speaking for the PartiQL team on this (congrats on the launch!): The reference implementation is open source; what's the plan for the language spec? Is that something that AWS is going to own and control? The website references the PartiQL Steering Committee -- is that just AWS folks or is the intention to make it more broadly composed of members of the community you build?

I'm interested in adopting PartiQL for our product, but would we get to participate in the evolution of the language or would we purely be downstream of the decisions made to benefit AWS products and services?

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hi @ahl, I'm a member of PartiQL's steering committee and glad to see your interest to participate in PartiQL's evolution. The language spec source will be open-sourced, as well, early next week (week of Aug 5). Overall, we look forward to a community effort and participants that are interested in making significant investments to achieve the project's goals. Diverse opinions and viewpoints, both on the language and on the process, are very welcome.

At this point, the maintainers/committee is only Amazon members. As PartiQL grows towards a diverse community, we expect to add maintainers/committee (for code and spec) that have non-Amazon affiliations and explore more formalized methods of governance,as they will emerge from our community discussions.

Please email us at partiql-committee@amazon.com to further coordinate.

Disclosure: I work for AWS and provided some opinions and non-prescriptive advice to the team behind PartiQL about Open Source.

The same question was raised on Twitter, and I put my thoughts there: https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1157405984823758848

TL;DR, my advice is that successful open source projects and open specifications usually have diverse communities. You will have a hard time attracting people to your community of they do not share goals with the rest of the community. We should have some bounding boxes around how the spec evolves through clear tenets. Otherwise welcome diverse opinions, experience, and problems to solve collaboratively.

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