I've been a Cassandra user for 5+ years and have been watching the drama unfold on the mailing lists the past few months. I have no business relationship with Datastax and have never paid them money for any of their services (except for attending the Datastax sponsored Cassandra Summit a number of times). I'm not a committer but I have been an active member of the community opening bugs, participating in the user mailing list, Stack Overflow, maintaining a client library, etc.

From my perspective it seemed like the ASF board members had already prejudged the situation before engaging in any public discussions on the Cassandra mailing lists. The first interaction was about why Cassandra doesn't ship with its own client drivers[1]. The board member believed this to be a sign of Datastax "controlling" Cassandra because they have their own high quality open source client libraries. As a user and a former maintainer of a client library, this theory came off as completely ridiculous. The project has never shipped a production ready client driver in tree. It is simply impractical to be able to do that for all the languages for which there are drivers. I've got code in three different languages in production right now and none of them use Datastax drivers. If you read that mailing list thread, that is basically what everyone says on it (including the new Casssandra PMC chair), and yet the conclusion that the ASF board member takes away is that Datastax is controlling the project by having out of tree open source client libraries.

That ASF board member also got upset when a question on the mailing list was answered with a link to Datastax hosted documentation[2]. Again this seemed like an overreaction from the board member over a fixable problem as justification for a Cassandra shakeup.

Then recently there was a new wave of threads about Apache and Datastax[3][4]. Both sides come off looking pretty bad in these threads. Its clear that at this point a lot of people in the Cassandra community have negative feelings toward certain members of the ASF board. It also seems like those board members have become very defensive about what has transpired. Fortunately people have started to calm down and there has been a few reasonable emails from both sides.

From my perspective the ASF came off looking like they care more about the Apache trademarks than they do about the health of the community. I do believe there were some actual issues that were identified as places for improvement for the Cassandra community, but I don't think it was necessary to come in wielding a sledge hammer. It seems that the Cassandra board was not given an opportunity to fix the issues (mostly by increasing the number of project committers) before the board forced the changes. This has resulted in a lot of hurt feelings and a general sense of distrust between the Cassandra community and the ASF.

All that being said, I'm not particularly worried about Cassandra's future. I was sad to see Jonathan Ellis leave as the chair person, but hearing that Nate McCall was stepping into that position put a lot of my concerns at ease.

I hope that the Datastax folks know that the community appreciates all that they have contributed to the open source Cassandra project, even if the ASF doesn't.

[1]: https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/72a884fa8f35cbed23135c8...

[2]: http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg0914...

[3]: http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg1003...

[4]: http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg1002...