Page History

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• Releases: Began producing incubating releases in 2016; later established a steady cadence.
• Community growth: Quickly broadened participation beyond Airbnb — - contributors from Google, Polidea, and independents became committers.
• Governance: Shifted all decision-making onto dev@ mailing lists.
• Ecosystem impact: Widely adopted in data-engineering ecosystems; integrations accelerated growth.
• Mentorship: Mentors emphasized neutrality and rotating release managers.

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• Community context: An established ecosystem already existed under the OpenZipkin GitHub organization.
• Challenges: Development and issue tracking remained primarily in the external GitHub organization; ASF mailing lists were under-utilized.
• Releases: No incubating ASF releases were produced.
• Mentorship: Concerns were raised about lack of ASF alignment (releases, infrastructure, governance).

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NetBeans shows that incubation isn’t just for new projects — - even mature, widely used codebases must:

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Kafka is often cited as a strong multi-company community; as its commercial ecosystem expanded, the community continued to discuss how to preserve vendor-neutral governance.

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Case Study 16: Apache Pulsar

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- Modern Distributed Messaging with Transparent Governance

Entry

• Originally developed at Yahoo! for cloud messaging.
• Entered the Apache Incubator in June 2017.

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Arrow shows that ASF governance can successfully coordinate long-term, cross-language data standards serving a broad ecosystem.

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Case Study 25: Apache NiFi

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- From Government Research to Open Collaboration

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• Originated within the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as “NiagaraFiles.”
• Donated to the ASF through a U.S. government release process.
• Entered the Apache Incubator in November 2014.

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