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Blazegraph fork?

Open berezovskyi opened this issue 6 years ago • 43 comments

Now that it seems Amazon has acquired Blazegraph (https://www.trademarkia.com/blazegraph-86498414.html etc), does it make sense for the OSS community to fork Blazegraph and restart the development (at least processing the PRs)?

berezovskyi avatar Apr 12 '18 16:04 berezovskyi

Another goal of a forked/reborn blazegraph would be to migrate the sesame dependency to org.eclipse.rdf4j.

ianwdunlop avatar Apr 23 '18 11:04 ianwdunlop

Anyone still interested in forking blazegraph and trying to keep it alive in the OSS community? Maybe someone already has. If so where is the project? Maybe a possible strategy is to fork and try to build from master and the latest unreleased branch (maybe 2.2.0). I've tried building but there are some test failures. Has anyone else tried building from source?

ianwdunlop avatar Nov 15 '18 14:11 ianwdunlop

@ianwdunlop @berezovskyi We've had some recent discussions on this and there seems to be community interest, which we're working to gather together. Feel free to update this interest for folks that would be interested.

@smalyshev @thompsonbry

beebs-systap avatar Nov 16 '18 18:11 beebs-systap

I propose we set up a project, e.g. bigblaze or blazebig seem to be non-trademarked, and add anyone interested from the community as members. Of course it would be great if the original authors of Blazegraph would participate in this development.

nyurik avatar Dec 01 '18 02:12 nyurik

@nyurik That's a fair proposal. It would be good to hear more from @beebs-systap and folks about what their intentions are - whether they would like to keep the original blazegraph repo going or if it is time to start a new project based on the existing code.

ianwdunlop avatar Dec 05 '18 09:12 ianwdunlop

There have been some discussions about moving the project to wikidata / wikimedia and some strong expressions of interest for that from the their community. Adding Stas and Beebs..

Bryan

On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 01:55 Ian Dunlop [email protected] wrote:

@nyurik https://github.com/nyurik That's a fair proposal. It would be good to hear more from @beebs-systap https://github.com/beebs-systap and folks about what their intentions are - whether they would like to keep the original blazegraph repo going or if it is time to start a new project based on the existing code.

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thompsonbry avatar Dec 05 '18 15:12 thompsonbry

I think @smalyshev is doing an amazing job with various Blazegraph improvements, and certainly should be one of the key people driving this project forward, but I do not think Blazegraph fork should be under Wikimedia's umbrella, using less convenient or familiar tooling (gerrit/phabricator), or managed by WMF management. Rather, I think it should remain in GitHub e.g. a separate organization as a typical open source project, with a low barrier of entry, a wide community of contributing and reviewing developers, and WMF developers actively participating.

nyurik avatar Dec 05 '18 15:12 nyurik

I suspect that the project could stay where it is in terms of tooling. The question is more about the responsibility for producing releases. Brad has discussed some options for providing CI resources.

It would be great to get a sense of how many people would be interested in leaning in to help wikimedia support the open source blazegraph platform. That might help them make this transition happen.

Thanks, Bryan

On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 7:54 AM Yuri Astrakhan [email protected] wrote:

I think @smalyshev https://github.com/smalyshev is doing an amazing job with various Blazegraph improvements, and certainly should be one of the key people driving this project forward, but I do not think Blazegraph fork should be under Wikimedia's umbrella, using less convenient or familiar tooling (gerrit/phabricator), or managed by WMF management. Rather, I think it should remain in GitHub e.g. a separate organization as a typical open source project, with a low barrier of entry, a wide community of contributing and reviewing developers, and WMF developers actively participating.

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thompsonbry avatar Dec 06 '18 22:12 thompsonbry

In https://github.com/turbolent/embergraph I've took 2.1.5-RC and started renaming the code to Embergraph (to avoid inflicting on trademarks), cleaning up the code base, and updating it (Java 8).

I plan on mostly updating the SPARQL server (probably replacing Jetty and servlets with something else) and will try to update dependencies (e.g. migrate to RDF4J).

turbolent avatar Jan 13 '19 06:01 turbolent

Awesome for getting involved. However, you might consider just issuing CRs. Stas should have access to a CI setup and he and/or Brad can cut releases.

Bryan

On Sat, Jan 12, 2019 at 22:51 Bastian Müller [email protected] wrote:

In https://github.com/turbolent/embergraph I've took 2.1.5-RC and started renaming the code to Embergraph (to avoid inflicting on trademarks), cleaning up the code base, and updating it (Java 8).

I plan on mostly updating the SPARQL server (probably replacing Jetty and servlets with something else) and will try to update dependencies (e.g. migrate to RDF4J).

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thompsonbry avatar Jan 14 '19 00:01 thompsonbry

CR == pull request

On Sun, Jan 13, 2019 at 16:41 Bryan B. Thompson [email protected] wrote:

Awesome for getting involved. However, you might consider just issuing CRs. Stas should have access to a CI setup and he and/or Brad can cut releases.

Bryan

On Sat, Jan 12, 2019 at 22:51 Bastian Müller [email protected] wrote:

In https://github.com/turbolent/embergraph I've took 2.1.5-RC and started renaming the code to Embergraph (to avoid inflicting on trademarks), cleaning up the code base, and updating it (Java 8).

I plan on mostly updating the SPARQL server (probably replacing Jetty and servlets with something else) and will try to update dependencies (e.g. migrate to RDF4J).

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thompsonbry avatar Jan 14 '19 00:01 thompsonbry

@turbolent Would you be amenable to setting up a CLA to push the changes back into the core Blazegraph?

beebs-systap avatar Jan 15 '19 00:01 beebs-systap

2 quick comments. Why do we need a CLA to push changes (via pull request I assume) back into the core blazegraph repo? Is this a different repo from this one? Isn't all this covered by the current licence (GPL 2)? From recent comments it seems that you would like to restart blazegraph development using this repo rather than fork off to anywhere else. I like that idea.

ianwdunlop avatar Jan 15 '19 10:01 ianwdunlop

In https://github.com/turbolent/embergraph I've took 2.1.5-RC and started renaming the code to Embergraph (to avoid inflicting on trademarks), cleaning up the code base, and updating it (Java 8).

I plan on mostly updating the SPARQL server (probably replacing Jetty and servlets with something else) and will try to update dependencies (e.g. migrate to RDF4J).

I do like the Embergraph name, but there does seem to be another project by that name. Not sure if that's a problem.

I am not sure what you meant by renaming the code to Embergraph - IANAL, but it seems MariaDB who went through the similar process did not modified the actual code - as that would make the code incompatible with extensions/external modifications. There is a difference between classnames that use Blazegraph or Bigdata internally, and the branding of the product. I suspect we only need to modify the later.

nyurik avatar Jan 15 '19 17:01 nyurik

@ianwdunlop @nyurik Yes, you can definitely fork it under GPLv2 into a separate project. However, we would like to see if there's interest in getting a set of interested parties to collaborate on restarting development in this github. WMF/Wikidata would definitely have a role as a significant stakeholder, but is not the only one. The CLA is needed to make sure that the contributions can be accepted under GPLv2, but it can be a fairly lightweight process. Would you be amenable to setting up a quick chat to discuss in more details?

beebs-systap avatar Jan 15 '19 17:01 beebs-systap

@beebs-systap I obviously would prefer not to fork if possible, and sure, ping me at my firstandlastname at gmail :) I was under the impression that now that the trademark belongs to Amazon, no one outside of Amazon can use it, hence the need for a fork. Another (possibly minor or irrelevant?) concern is re-licensing - e.g. if a person contributes code to this repo under GPL2, can Amazon re-license that contribution under a proprietary license?

nyurik avatar Jan 15 '19 20:01 nyurik

I agree with @nyurik that keeping it in the original repo is preferred over a fork. If a CLA is necessary to contribute under gpl2 then that seems ok. I imagine what contributors need assurance over is that any code they commit remains open source forever. I guess we would have to clarify any trademark issues since that could cause problems for some people. Ping me at gmail for a lightweight discussion. One thought that did occur to me is what branch development should be focussed on? master or the latest unreleased branch or another? What would be the priorities for a re-invigorated blazegraph? I think it would be getting dependencies up to the latest rdf4j etc rather than focussing on new features.

ianwdunlop avatar Jan 16 '19 10:01 ianwdunlop

@ianwdunlop @nyurik Sounds workable. Yes, everything would be open source under GPLv2 and the CLA is a fairly standard process (it has always been in-place for Bigdata/Blazegraph). I think there's two priorities; updating the 2.1.5 branch as needed and picking up the 2.2.0 branch for future work.

Let me setup a quick meeting/discussion offline with you and we can chat through some of the details.

beebs-systap avatar Jan 16 '19 16:01 beebs-systap

We had some discussions at ISWC (last fall) with wikidata and some others on priorities. Priorities should emerge out of the community, but clearly updating the dependencies would be high on the list based on previous discussions.

Bryan

On Wed, Jan 16, 2019 at 8:54 AM Brad Bebee [email protected] wrote:

@ianwdunlop https://github.com/ianwdunlop @nyurik https://github.com/nyurik Sounds workable. Yes, everything would be open source under GPLv2 and the CLA is a fairly standard process (it has always been in-place for Bigdata/Blazegraph). I think there's two priorities; updating the 2.1.5 branch as needed and picking up the 2.2.0 branch for future work.

Let me setup a quick meeting/discussion offline with you and we can chat through some of the details.

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thompsonbry avatar Jan 16 '19 17:01 thompsonbry

I am not sure if depending on Amazon's goodwill regarding the trademark is a good idea. Also, CLA likely means a copyright assignment process which would allow Amazon to use GPLed contributions in Neptune without contributing any patches back to Blazegraph under GPL, which might not be in the spirit of GPL.

But I understand that Wikimedia and a few others are major users of Blazegraph and we should hear their opinion. From a cursory look, seems like @turbolent and @ianwdunlop have the most active forks and the former is free from trademark use.

UPD: USPTO/WIPO have 0 hits on 'Embergraph'.

berezovskyi avatar Feb 16 '19 18:02 berezovskyi

The CLA has been in place since 2006. We always accepted contributions under a CLA in order to help protect everyone’s rights. Of course, there are plenty of opinions about open source, but this is how blazegraph contributions were managed from the project inception. It is nothing new with Amazon.

Bryan

On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 10:53 Andrew Berezovskyi [email protected] wrote:

I am not sure if depending on Amazon's goodwill regarding the trademark is a good idea. Also, CLA likely means a copyright assignment process which would allow Amazon to use GPLed contributions in Neptune without contributing any patches back to Blazegraph under GPL, which might not be in the spirit of GPL.

But I understand that Wikimedia and a few others are the major users of Blazegraph and we should hear their opinion. From a cursory look, seems like @turbolent https://github.com/turbolent and @ianwdunlop https://github.com/ianwdunlop have the most active forks and the former is free from trademark use.

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thompsonbry avatar Feb 16 '19 19:02 thompsonbry

Is that CLA published anywhere?

akuckartz avatar Feb 17 '19 06:02 akuckartz

I don't see it up online off hand. It is referenced at [1,2]. Brad would be able to provide you with a current version.

Thanks, Bryan

[1] https://wiki.blazegraph.com/wiki/index.php/Contributors [2] https://www.blazegraph.com/develop/

On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 10:38 PM Andreas Kuckartz [email protected] wrote:

Is that CLA published anywhere?

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thompsonbry avatar Feb 17 '19 22:02 thompsonbry

These links may be of use to see how it looked in the past:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140103220007/http://www.systap.com/BigdataIndividualCA.pdf

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20140103215942/http://www.systap.com/BigdataCorporateCA.pdf

berezovskyi avatar Feb 18 '19 23:02 berezovskyi

Hi everybody, I'm currently in the process of evaluating different graph databases and one of them is blazegraph. It looks really promising, and we are thinking about choosing it for our solution.

However, the uncertainty of the future of this project, lets us still hesitate whether we should adopt it or not. Are there any updates about the plans of this project?

Thanks for your help, Jochen

elft3r avatar May 17 '19 13:05 elft3r

@elft3r Wikidata is running it in production and there's interest in continuing to move it forward.

beebs-systap avatar May 17 '19 16:05 beebs-systap

@beebs-systap Thanks for your quick reply. Are there already plans laid out on how it will move forward?

elft3r avatar May 20 '19 08:05 elft3r

@elft3r There's ongoing discussion and a general outline, which is in process.

beebs-systap avatar May 20 '19 15:05 beebs-systap

I am ok closing the issue given that there are new releases.

berezovskyi avatar May 30 '19 15:05 berezovskyi

Hi all, what is the current status? There was no new release for almost one year ...

ben-j-herbertz avatar Feb 10 '21 13:02 ben-j-herbertz