Jackson moving into CommonHaus Foundation
Jackson project is joining CommonHaus foundation as one of its founding projects, along with a few other popular Java, including:
Why join CommonHaus?
Jackson is a widely used project supported by a small team — originally just me, but even these days just me and half a dozen active contributors.
This has both its benefits (less process, communication overhead, more consistent approach, codebase) and drawbacks — some non-technical aspects that user community would like to see, including but not limited to some guarantees of long-term sustainability in case of the main contributor (me) got burnt out (see f.ex the recent XZ-Utils incident) remain challenging. But joining one of existing foundations — likely Apache or Eclipse —that could help has its own challenges too, due to a level of involvement and (on-going) effort required, related to project governance.
So when we were contacted by people with the idea of a new foundation focused on sustainability, and low-friction collaboration (“minimum viable governance”), support — eventually named CommonHaus — I was very excited. This seemed like something that could evolve into something that Jackson project would really want to join.
And after healthy process of figuring out most of the big picture things (and many of smaller details too), time has come to announce CommonHaus Foundation, along with a set of projects that have made commitment to join. Projects will be joining over coming months, using standardized on-boarding process.
So Jackson project is proud to be on founding members and will join the CommonHaus Foundation.
What does it mean for Users?
On short term, nothing much. There will be changes to project/repo READMEs, addition of nice foundation logo. Stuff like that.
Medium term, we hope benefit from adding community-oriented improvements with standard templates and so on; possibly some branding.
But in general this should not be a big visible change to end users.
What does it mean for Contributors?
The exact on-boarding implication is still being defined, but it is expected to have limited impact here as well, especially initially. This because foundation is not focused on unification (compared to other foundations) but on being a Stable Long-Term home with Minimum viable governance.
What next?
Keep on Trucking! If you are using Jackson components, keep doing so.
If not, have a look!
