Moving Zipkin out in the open

[Eirik Sletteberg]

Hey!

I've been approached by a couple of developers from other companies, who want to contribute actively to Zipkin. We all wish that Zipkin was more open - so that there would be a handful of core contributors reviewing pull requests, and in general provide a higher speed of development. I think that would very beneficial to the Zipkin project, and the ecosystem around it - Brave, Tryfer, more aggregation jobs, and other potential things people want to implement support for!

Basically, it would mean moving Zipkin to its own organisation on GitHub (like the "finagle" organisation), or to Apache, and then inviting more contributors who can review pull requests.

What do you guys think?

Regards,

Eirik Sletteberg

[Brian Degenhardt]

Hooboy this sparked a big internal discussion.  This might take a while to hash-out internally, can we get back to you in like a week?

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[R. Tyler Croy]

(replies inline)

Coming from Lookout, we've got our own fork (https://github.com/lookout/zipkin)
and are making in-roads into improving Ruby support and have discussed
refactoring the existing Cassandra implementation with more TLC :)


Right now we're very very very (ad infinitum) hesitent to spend additional time
putting together pull requests to send upstream, where there doesn't seem to be
lots of merging happen nor much community involvement :(



Anyways, I'd love to put some iron behind an open Zipkin community, whether
just a GitHub organization or at the ASF.


Cheers
- R. Tyler Croy

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[Eirik Sletteberg]

Take your time! I realise it's a big decision. I hope you'll sort out any internal disagreements eventually! Have you decided anything yet?

[Brian Degenhardt]

Sorry about the delay.  I haven't forgot about you guys, we're still working it out here.

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[Eirik Sletteberg]

How's it going? Any news?

onsdag 15. april 2015 18.24.42 UTC+2 skrev Eirik Sletteberg følgende:

[R. Tyler Croy]

(replies inline)

On Mon, 04 May 2015, Eirik Sletteberg wrote:

> How's it going? Any news?

In lieu of any news on this front, we (Lookut, Inc) have been moving forward
with publishing our forked code more automatically up to bintray here:
<https://bintray.com/lookout/zipkin> (sourced from:
https://github.com/lookout/zipkin).


I hope we can get this resolved, but right now, unless I want to fork privately
(which I really don't), we've got to continue moving forward with our fork :/

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[Brian Degenhardt]

Go for it, we're making progress on re-staffing the zipkin project but I don't want to promise anything and it's too slow here to keep y'all waiting.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/zipkin-dev/20150505155345.GA2068%40blackberry.coupleofllamas.com.

[Eirik Sletteberg]

Just a couple of questions that should be discussed - not in any significant order:

- Can we keep the Zipkin name and the com.twitter.zipkin namespace?

- Would Twitter engineers support the move towards an open organisation, or would you rather maintain an in-house fork? (The first option would of course be preferable)

- If there are any significant changes in twitter/zipkin (the upstream repository), could you please push them out so it's possible to build patches on top of the last version?

- Who should have commit access/core contributor access?

- Who should lead the migration process? Twitter OSS enthusiasts? Or an ad-hoc group of interested parties?

- How should it be organised? As an Apache project?

- Should we keep the zipkin-user and zipkin-dev user groups, and use them for the "open" project?

- How do we decide which direction the project is taking? Roadmap?

- How should we solve any disagreements?

[Eirik Sletteberg]

I believe there are some PRs that have been merged internally, but not re-published on GitHub... is that correct? It would be great to get these changes included! (Even if just by commiting the files without preserving git history)

onsdag 15. april 2015 18.24.42 UTC+2 skrev Eirik Sletteberg følgende:

[Eirik Sletteberg]

A fork of Zipkin has now been established here:

https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin

We'll work on trying to merge the different Zipkin forks out there, and accept some of the waiting PRs.

Should we join Apache?

[Nakamura]

What are the benefits you see from joining apache?

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[R. Tyler Croy]

(replies inline)

On Thu, 21 May 2015, Nakamura wrote:

> What are the benefits you see from joining apache?

The biggest two benefits that I'm personally interested in are:

* Structure for running the project, including open governance guidelines
* Neutral place for Zipkin to thrive independently. Storm is a fantastic
recent exapmle of this from the Twitter stack, IMO.

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[Mick Semb Wever]

> What are the benefits you see from joining apache?


The biggest two benefits that I'm personally interested in are:

 * Structure for running the project, including open governance guidelines
 * Neutral place for Zipkin to thrive independently. Storm is a fantastic
   recent exapmle of this from the Twitter stack, IMO.

Huge respect for the efforts in building up a community!
What has been the response from Twitter here? Are they positive?
 (it's kinda crucial we've them on board for it to succeed)

I mentioned to Eirik a while ago, back when i sat next to him in the office, around whether Zipkin might be a win as an Apache project.

Apart from the kudos it gives to those developers that are involved, I do believe that putting the apache label on the project would really help clarify the hard work that's gone into building up a community, adding that extra layer of trust for users, which further fuels adoption. People expect apache projects to have healthy communities with committers from various companies all working on the one repository, not a mirage of forks. This helps assure that the project and codebase won't suddenly change direction or die, leaving them but alone with but their own fork of it. It could also help bring Zipkin forward as the de-facto implemention for tracing.

The rules that apache impose I can't see being of any hindrance. The board tries its hardest to stay out of the way, letting projects govern themselves. The rules that are there are to add legal protection (which the apache foundation will defend for you if need be), and to ensure that image of a healthy thriving community.

A little about myself… i'm on the apache board (for the very small but still kicking Tiles project), and would be in favour of convincing folk of getting Zipkin into apache, straight in as a top-level-project bypassing the incubator - which has become just recently possible. I don't think it would be a difficult process and happy to take on the administration/secretarial side of things, by far the hardest part to the adventure is the community building side of affairs which needs to happen first anyway.

Otherwise i work at The Last Pickle, where Zipkin is an important technology for our clients. I've presented on Zipkin at three different Cassandra conferences so far, and always received a lot of interest and questions in the technology. In the code I'm keen to upgrade the datamodel to be Cassandra cql based, really testing and ensuring its scalability.

Does it sound like an adventure for Zipkin and the developers here?
Maybe something to discuss further in Budapest?

~mck

[ac...@twitter.com]

On Wednesday, May 20, 2015 at 12:26:29 PM UTC-7, Eirik Sletteberg wrote:

A fork of Zipkin has now been established here:

https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin

 For closure on this part of the thread, Twitter is on-board with openzipkin being upstream per https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zipkin-dev/fbOgEZpuQx4

This is the issue we need to complete to make that happen.

https://github.com/twitter/zipkin/issues/453

I'll move our internal build to use openzipkin as soon as it is published.

Excellent work getting the community together!

-A