[RFC][DISCUSS] TVM Apache Incubation #2401
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2 similar comments
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Thanks for everyone who responded so far, I have updated the thread to also discuss the cons, and removed the +1, -1 so it does not look like a vote. If you have some specific questions, or thoughts, please feel free to share them. |
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The transition sounds good to me. One thing is, will Apache require us to transition the website/CI hosting? |
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re. CI/website, as far as I understand, the main website(https://tvm.ai) will need to be migrated to https://tvm.incubator.apache.org or https://tvm.apache.org . Likely we can keep our own CIs due to the special requirement to setup the pipelines and discuss forum. Regardless of where things go, the general principle is that the project will be owned by ASF and resources are owned and shared by the community |
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what are the success statistics for Apache projects that have University-paid versus Company-paid principals? I am worried that a project with this level of complexity needs a continuously engaged engineering team of significant cost and skill level to keep the core healthy. |
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I think whether a contributor comes from university or company does not matter. It is dangerous to impose bias toward either one. Note that a contributors' background does not necessarily imply their skill level. I have personally seen proliferate open source contributors from both backgrounds. Our merit-based principle means that whoever made sustained high-quality contributions will get added to as a committer and gain more weight in the decision. The quality of the codebase really boils down to whether can we have a diverse and healthy community that upholds a high standard, and works together closely. I think we are working hard toward that :) |
I think that's already what we have! Even without incubation and a community-based dev team, TVM is already a significant way towards not only fast ML on the usual devices, but also heretofore unexplored ones with VTA. Indeed, TVM's development closely parallels that of MXNet, which continues to thrive, and actually drops some of the procedural/tooling baggage that can hinder contribution. Furthermore, although there are certainly success stories of paid core devs (e.g., Neovim), keeping the project maintained exclusively by the community aligns its goals with both the ASF and those same people who use it. Of course, one unique aspect of TVM is that its stakeholders come from both industry and academia. Very often, too, contributors represent both interests (e.g., those at industry research labs). (And, personally, I'd be more reassured by an army of capable grad students spending their 25 hour days hacking on TVM :). Overall, I think that there's no worry that the TVM codebase would grow anything but more cohesive. |
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Sebastian here from the ASF. I would like to note that many successful
Apache projects such as Flink or Spark managed to attract a mix of
(paid) academic and industry contributors.
A goal of the incubation process in Apache is to broaden the set of
stakeholders in a project so that it does not exclusively rely on the
benevolence of a single contributing entity.
Best,
Sebastian
…On 09.01.19 08:41, Theodore Omtzigt wrote:
what are the success statistics for Apache projects that have
University-paid versus Company-paid principals? I am worried that a
project with this level of complexity needs a continuously engaged
engineering team of significant cost and skill level to keep the core
healthy.
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I'm all for this proposed transition. And regarding academic-based vs. industry-based engineering team, I think we have the right mix to keep the project healthy and growing! |
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Let us do apache incubation |
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I am in favor as well. My only concerns are about development workflow/methodology, i.e staying on Github, and avoiding JIRA. |
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Markus here, like @sscdotopen from the ASF. Allow me to address a couple of the questions raised so far. I realize that some of what I say is repetitive with the comments made by others, but maybe the different formulation from a different perspective is useful. @jroesch said:
The vast majority of the workflow of TVM seems unaffected by a move to the ASF. The biggest challenge usually is to move to a everything-documented workflow where ideas are discussed and decisions are made in a public, archived form. TVM already does this on GitHub and its mailing list. There is a minor adjustment I see coming, though: Discussions will move to an ASF mailing list, and discussions on GitHub will have to be mirrored there. This "everything (also) happens on the ASF list" requirement allows the foundation to provide its various legal and other shields for projects. @Ravenwater said:
Not sure whether such stats are kept :-(. However, a couple of high-profile projects were started at universities, and the move to the ASF was at least not a hindrance to their success. In fact, I believe that the move to the ASF massively contributed to their success, as contributions from industry became substantially easier, and less lawyer-heavy. Apache Spark and Apache Flink are good examples in this category. But your question raises another important concern the ASF actually cares a great deal about: Is the project dependent upon the benevolence of a single entity or not? For a project to be stable in the long term, it has to be as diverse in its support as possible. That is why one major goal during incubation and on the way to graduation to become a top level project is to broaden this support. And having a mixture of members from both industry and academia is beneficial for the stability here. @ZihengJiang said:
Yes and no :). The ASF will own the trademarks to the project name, e.g. "Apache TVM". As such, the domain registration(s) of the project, the twitter handle, … and other uses of this trademark need to be under ASF control. This is usually done by sharing custody of those within the PMC. The ASF does provide CI, but I found it often inferior to what other companies offer to OSS projects for free (Shameless plug: Azure DevOps Pipelines :-) ). There is no requirement to use the ASF infrastructure. Just like with domain names and hosting, the important thing is that access and ownership lies with the project. For instance, a private build server at UW being a critical part of the workflow would be problematic (but not a blocker, Spark has done this in the past). |
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To follow up a bit on comments on development workflow. One thing that Apache is quite strict about is the dev@ mail-list(aka. everything (also) happens on the ASF list), this helps to provide a legal shield to the discussion. Given that our current way of development requires major design decisions and discussions being made in Github issues, we will likely resolve the issue by mirroring Github issues into dev@. I think one thing that we want to discuss is if we can keep the discourse forum https://discuss.tvm.ai/. While Apache projects are mail-list heavy, many users of the projects and developers find it easy to make use of discourse forums. And this approach has been adopted by communities like Rust, Pytorch, Julia. The discuss forum has become a crucial place to enable vibrate community discussions. Given that discourse is used for technical discussions and general support, and the content is publically available to the community, I feel that it is possible for ASF to agree on keeping it as long as it is moderated by PMCs, but maybe @markusweimer @sscdotopen can confirm this as well. Note that major design decisions, which will appear as RFCs(issues), get mirrored into dev@. |
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Hi Tianqi,
I asked on the incubator mailing list whether the ASF has an official
stance on discussion boards, I will keep you (and the TVM community)
updated on what they answer. I also feel that it would make sense to
keep it.
Best,
Sebastian
…On 10.01.19 13:40, Tianqi Chen wrote:
To follow up a bit on comments on development workflow. One thing that
Apache is quite strict about is the dev@ mail-list. There is a that
everything (also) happens on the ASF list, this helps to provide a legal
shield to the discussion. Given that our current way of development
requires major design decisions and discussions being made in Github
issues, we will likely resolve the issue by mirroring Github issues into
***@***.***
I think one possible grey part of the field is the discourse forum
https://discuss.tvm.ai/. While Apache projects are mail-list heavy, many
users of the projects and developers find it easy to make use of
discourse forums. And this approach has been adopted by communities like
Rust, Pytorch, Julia. The discuss forum has become a crucial part to
enable vibrate community discussions. Given that discourse is used for
technical discussions and general support, I feel that there might be
less barrier in keeping it, but maybe @markusweimer
<https://github.com/markusweimer> @sscdotopen
<https://github.com/sscdotopen> can confirm this as well. Note that
major design decisions, which will appear as RFCs(issues), get mirrored
into ***@***.***
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To follow up a bit on the discourse, one way to make it work with the current ASF infra is to archive every post into a mail-list. I have done some experiments on this and found it is possible via mail-list mode In particular, I created an account (archiver on the forum), with its own gmail account and enabled mail-list mode. I can confirm the email received all the posts as emails. Then the only thing we need to do is to set up forwarding rules to forward the email to the target mail-list. cc @sscdotopen |
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Hi Tianqi,
Thank you for trying this, if we archive to an ASF controlled email list
(which we can get from Apache Infra), than everything should be fine :)
Best,
Sebastian
…On 14.01.19 17:32, Tianqi Chen wrote:
To follow up a bit on the discourse, one way to make it work with the
current ASF infra is to archive every post into a mail-list. I have done
some experiments on this and found it is possible via mail-list mode
<https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-mailing-list-mode/46008>
In particular, I created an account archiver, with its own gmail account
and enabled mail-list mode. I can confirm the email received all the
posts as emails. Then the only thing we need to do is to set up
forwarding rules to forward the email to the target mail-list. cc
@sscdotopen <https://github.com/sscdotopen>
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+1 apache is a good way to go. |
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Thanks, everyone for helpful discussions. To summarize, we agree that it is a good idea to move to Apache. The community will need to strive to address the issues being raised and makes the project better for everyone. We would like to invite everyone to review the formal incubation proposal draft in #2466 and move further discussions there. |
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+1 apache is a good way to go. |
Dear community, happy new year! As the TVM community grows larger, we have heard voices on the possibility of joining a software foundation. As per our community tradition, I open this thread for discussing the possible futures of the community. In particular, we would like to discuss the possibility to propose TVM to Apache Incubator.
Please share your thoughts, concerns, ideas.
Why
The TVM currently runs like an Apache project already, with merit-based governance model and a strong emphasis of community. So it is natural to do such a transition. Markus, our potential Apache mentor kindly gave a talk during TVM conference. You can find his slides here
Why Not
Apache does not magically make things happen. I have seen good and bad things happen in Apache communities. Sometimes it is simply due to the conflict of interest happened in bad ways, and not necessarily has a direct connection to incubation itself. As a diverse community, we believe we have already experienced ways to work together in a positive and collaborative way, so I hope such risk is minimized.
Another potential risk could be changing ways of development. Historically, Apache projects favor a single way of development:
These restrictions are being lifted recently and Apache encourages each project to follow their way of development(e.g. use github issues). One of the main philosophy behind these choices is to make sure that the development is not dominated by a single party. For example, face to face or one to one hangout call makes it hard for other parties to participate. So we need to ask developers to summarize their discussions and provide RFC to the community via public archive(e.g. github issues). By making all the development and discussion history public, we enable community members who maybe not have time to participate face to face meetings to join the development smoothly as well. Our community adopts the same philosophy(develop in a publically archivable place), with slight variants:
My understanding is that the Apache is flexible enough as long as we follow the general principle. Likely we will need to subscribe github issues to dev@, but can keep the discourse forum and use github for development
How it could affect us
We shall continue to grow the community and make TVM awesome for everyone. Because the TVM already follows the Apache-style governance model, the transition should be smooth. There will be a disruptive period when we transition the codebase
The following things will happen, based on my previous experience with Apache projects,
if we decide to incubate
The current committers will be invited as to Apache committers. The current PMC already follows the Apache style of voting in committers, and we only need to migrate the PMC mail-list. While reviewer is not an official role in Apache projects, we can still propose to maintaining our reviewer list and use this mechanism to help us find potential committers.
Share your thoughts
As per community tradition, all major proposals will be discussed as RFC by members of the community. We will open this thread for a week for discussions on whether should we join the process. I have invited our potential mentors(@markusweimer, @sscdotopen, @bgchun) to join the discussion as well.
I will send out the incubating proposal for public RFC as well if we agree that that is a good idea. cc @dmlc/tvm-comitter
Please share your thoughts, examples:
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