Slightly different The Business of Open Source episode today! I spoke with Patrick McFadin and Mick Semb Wever about the relationship between Apache Cassandra and DataStax — how it was at the beginning and how the relationship has evolved over the years. 

We talked about:

— How there was a dynamic around Cassandra where many of the many of the contributors ended up being sucked into the DataStax orbit, simply because it allowed those contributors to work on on Cassandra full-time

— How there can be tensions between different stakeholders simply because everyone involved ultimately has their own interests at heart, and those interests are not always aligned. 

— How it is actually hard to really have open discussions about new features, and how often there can be a new feature dropped in a project that clearly had been developed behind closed doors for some time, and sometimes that created tension in the community

— Some open source projects are just too complex to be hobby projects — Cassandra is so complex that you won’t become a code contributor unless you’re working full-time on Cassandra, because that’s the level of skill you need to keep up. 

— How the relationship between a company and a project often changes as the technology matures. 

— The importance of addressing tensions between company and community head-on, as adults, when they occur — as well as why you need to remember to treat people as humans and remember that they have good days, bad days, goals and interests.