Sustaining Apache Arrow and Parquet: The Arctos Alliance with Alex Scammon

But I wanted to talk a little bit about sustainability and open source, right? Like that's sort of the reason why GROS came about in the first place, was sort of this idea that if you're a company and you're relying on this critical piece of infrastructure, that means you're also invested in making sure that critical piece of infrastructure keeps moving, right?

Mm-hmm.

Like, and it, and it kinda feels like, and maybe AI is just a convenient blame for this, but it feels like as we're going more into the age of AI that, like investments in those areas and, like those critical pieces of technology are maybe getting pulled back some.

Is that, is that a pattern you've been seeing?

Um, actually I don't think so.

I see investments shifting and people trying to catch up and trying to figure out where the puck is moving to.

Um, I don't think it's out and out retreat from open source, but what I, I have seen more often is, uh, are some negative impacts on open source.

I, I don't think that the, the money situation is more or less than it ever has been.

Um, I, I think it's just sort of shifting a little.

Um, but I'm happy to talk about the other impacts of AI, uh, if, if you'd like.

That, that can go very deep.

Oh, uh, I mean please.

You're... [laughs]

Yeah.

I mean, the, the simple version there is that a lot of maintainers that... of projects that we care about have been inundated with not necessarily AI slop, just potentially drive by PRs, and they may be fine PRs, but it's not just enough to give a good PR to a maintainer.

There's a communication that happens after that, and you have to talk about what it is and maybe lobby for why you want it over the line.

Why should a maintainer take on a new chunk of code just because you wrote it? And actually that theme may come up a- [laughs] again later.

Uh, but we've actually seen a bunch of maintainers retreat from open source.

Even though their software is open source, they don't want to engage with the community because they're never sure who is actually a human behind some of these PRs.

So then for us who are coming to the table honestly and earnestly as humans wanting to contribute, we're not getting the attention of maintainers that, that we need even though we're there as humans.

The maintainers don't know who's human and who's not.

And one of the, the ramifications for us has been we've redoubled our efforts to, to engage socially in real human spaces because a, a large part of our ability to get things over the line depends on those social interactions, and we can't make those social interactions necessarily in the, uh, the, the town square of GitHub anymore.

We have to go outside of that, make the connections in real time, and then come back and do the business with the code.

So that's-

Yeah.