I love using Apache Thrift and want to contribute to this project. How do I do that?

[Jens Geyer <je...@hotmail.com>]

All Active and potential Thrift contributors,

I just received an email asking me certain things via personal inbox and thought it may be a good opportunity to spread the word by answering on the usual channels, i.e. the mailing list. I redacted the name of the sender to protect privacy.

>  I am using Apache/thrift in my project and found it`s really helpful in fact.
>  Does thrift have a committer mechanism similar to the Apache Foundation
>  to motivate more contributions? I want to do more things for the thrift community.

As an Top-Level Project of the Apache Software Foundation we of course welcome contributions of all kind. That’s one big pillar of how open source works. Although code is at the basis of all software, a contribution does not necessarily have to be code. One can also contribute by adding to the documentation or by improving tests. Contribution can be doing reviews, answering questions on the mailing lists or the IRC channels, helping with releases and the build process automation, and much more.

Since the ASF itself has already good web resources available to cover the basics, I take the liberty to just point you to the ASF Community overview page at http://community.apache.org<http://community.apache.org/Last>/

The Apache Thrift contribution process is documented on our website: http://thrift.apache.org/docs/HowToContribute

At this point I may add the not so unimportant point that by contributing a piece of anything the contributor is of course only entitled to contribute things he/she owns or has legal permission to contribute to the project and put it under an Apache 2.0 license.

After you earned your stripes as a contributor, sooner or later (depending on your activity and work), you may receive an invitation to become a committer. Amongst some other things, this comes with the privileges (and responsibility) to commit code into the Thrift repositories. But that’s a whole other topic on its own.


Have fun,
JensG