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Comment by DanielVZ | Hacker News Reader

There's so much on top of lucene that I'd say both

Especially considering ~11 of the Apache Lucene committers are Elastic employees as well as 10 members of the Apache Lucene Project Management Committee.

Disclosure: I work for AWS where I build infrastructure services that sit low in the stack. I am a relative novice when it comes to Java-heavy codebases like Apache Lucene, Elasticsearch, or OpenSearch. But I know a thing or two about Open Source and Communities.

I think it is hazardous to count the number of committers and PMC members that are part of a project that is built at the Apache Software Foundation. It is helpful to keep track of these things to make sure that the project keeps its independence, and is not unduly influenced by the interest of any one company or organization. Committers and PMC members earn their position based on their own efforts as individuals. They don't represent their employers.

The current Apache Lucene PMC chair just happens to work for Amazon today. A number of folks that used to work for Elastic now work at Amazon. But over-focusing on that, and keeping careful track of what company contributes how much to ASF projects, is bad for community health in my personal opinion.

See also Doug Cutting at https://twitter.com/cutting/status/1359160158723711002

I think it's reasonable to expect that corporate citizens worth billions of dollars would do their fair share of open source contributions. I'm curious why you think this is bad for community health.

It is totally reasonable to expect for-profit corporations to be good stewards of shared resources, such as the public goods that make up the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) commons. I think it is important to all users of FOSS that the software is well maintained, and is able to grow to meet the changing needs of users. We often call achieving a system where sufficient value created by FOSS can be captured in ways that funds its ongoing development and maintenance achieving a "self-sustaining" system. One view on sustainability in FOSS can be found in this Apache Software Foundation blog post [1].

Companies should also be respectful of the communities that produce and maintain software, including understanding the philosophy and governance that communities have adopted. For the Apache Software Foundation, this is being mindful to not unduly influence the project, such as to try to control it through employing a majority of the people who work on the project, or otherwise weaken the independence and autonomy for the community that builds and maintains the software. [2]

I've seen situations in the past where companies employ an open-source marketing strategy that ends up encouraging unhelpful activity in open source communities. This can also happen when companies measure the performance of a software developer based on metrics such as "number of patches accepted in an open source project." This kind of thing is generally unwelcome in open source software communities. See this thread on HN [3] on the Linux kernel development list, TL;DR - "Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches."

[1] https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-way-to-...

[2] http://community.apache.org/projectIndependence.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27629366

Indeed commit count is a silly metric. I reminds me of the bad incentives of the hacktoberfest

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