What a fun topic. I re-joined the list just for this. As I understand, it the nature of the Apache Software Licence any corporate entity is allows to produce open and closed source software based on Apache Cassandra, however the Cassandra name is a trademark of the ASF foundation.
As I under it, any corporation or person is free to maintain any documentation about the software in a public or private form. IMHO the Apache Cassandra wiki is in a sad state, and Corporate site X has better material, but that is not an indictment of Corporation X. I will leave planetcassandra.org to be its own issue. If someone were to propose a Java/Python driver to be included in the source code of Cassandra, and said driver were rejected that would be a clear red flag. There are several awkward things about the driver being found at somewhere else. These are all hypothetical but have practical implications. Following the 'itch to scratch' philosophy perhaps I want to write the driver in UDP for max performance. Right now even if it were implemented in the database you have a situation where the driver living over there ultimately is a VETO, you really can not accomplish one without there other and they have to move lock step to do reasonable development. There is a saying in apache something like "if it did not happen on the list/in jira it did not happen." We have to ask ourselves honestly: Q: Is it possible that technical writers "over there" are able to come up with better documentation than the project itself? A: Yes I wrote the Apache Hive book, and I believe it was more up to date and complete than the documentation at the time Q: Is that happening here? Who is to say? Q: Is the CQL spec "written" in code or in documentation good enough for someone to reasonable re-create the protocol? Paraphrased things said on this thread that make me laugh, cry, nod: "There are plenty of drivers like Kundera, hector" These projects have been killed off by people as they are unable to keep up with ever changing cassandra client specs. Thrift 0.6 -> 07 breaking changes, CQL and the entire deprecation of thrift and the original data model the database was built around. "Web server X does not come with a web browser" This is an established protocol for 20+ years and reasonable clients already exist. That is not building a new protocol and implementation that is conforming to an exist one apply the Apache logic to google Spdy. "Postres does it like X" Someone else pointed it out, but this ain't postgres, and this ain't mongohq. The Apache licence and the Apache way are different things. "No one at company X commits my patches because I dont work there" As the minority (non facebook) hive committer for years I can tell you, "wink wink"
