It’s now three months since I left IBM and I’m starting to get used to the idea. I’ve been dealing with some of the Eclipse Paho C client backlog – firstly the PRs, and now onto some of the issues. It’s much easier to keep things under control with steady effort rather than in bursts with long gaps. Apart from not allowing the backlog to accumulate into a formidable looking mountain, it also means that familiarity with the code doesn’t deteriorate as far.
That’s just the first part of my backlog though. The Java client MQTT V5 support is almost complete – it mostly needs the addition of new tests, both MQTT V5 specific and for base MQTT function. I would like to finish that off, ideally in collaboration with someone who could become the Paho committer responsible for the Java client in future. Apart from the V5 support, I don’t expect to work on the Java client on my own time, so someone does need to pick that up if it is to continue. I’m having discussions with both IBM and Microsoft on this topic, but I’ve not had any demonstration of commitment yet.
Then there are the Embedded MQTT and MQTT-SN projects which I’ve not looked at for at least 18 months. I originally created both of these, along with the main C client project, so I am interested in keeping these going. But that will have to start with assessing the backlog. I am aided in The MQTT-SN project by one of my colleagues, Tomoaki, who I hope to start working with again soon.
The MQTT-SN project crosses over with the MQTT-SN OASIS standardization effort, of which I am co-chair, which will kick off soon. I hope that the standardization of MQTT-SN will allow it to extend the MQTT ecosystem beyond pure TCP networks and into peer to peer meshes.
I think it’s fair to say that over the last decade I’ve been the glue that has held the Paho project together. I’ve stepped in when needed on the Java client, and last year added MQTT V5 support to the Python client library. I wrote an MQTT V5 broker so that we could test our implementations early.
Paho Contributions
But as I am no longer being paid to work on Paho, some action is likely needed to allow the project to continue in an active form. I have other interests I want to pursue, and I expect they will take up more of my time. The main types of contribution are people and money. We do have contributions all the time in the form of issues and pull requests, which is great, but we need committers to handle that work, resolve the issues, assess the pull requests and create releases.
Shortly before Christmas, I discovered that Github has introduced the notion of sponsorship, Github Sponsors. So as an experiment, I’ve signed up. If you rely on the project for some component, especially the ones I work on, or want to show your support for the project’s continuation, this is one way to do it. The sponsorship tiers were set by me. I took a guess at convenient levels, so I can change them to a certain extent if that helps.
Of course, no matter how much money I might get in sponsorship, I only have a finite amount of time available. This is why I suggest that organizations which have an interest in the survival of Paho to consider encouraging their own people to become more deeply involved in the project. The deepest involvement is becoming a committer and project leadership.
If there is insufficient interest to take actions to keep the project going then I am happy for the project or specific components, like the Java client, to be deprecated. So it’s really up to the community to let me know what you want, to demonstrate that you want the project to continue.
HiveMQ Sponsorship
I’ve had a discussion with HiveMQ already as I know the company has clients who use Paho to connect with their MQTT brokers. They do want the Paho project to continue and have agree to sponsor me for $500 per month. I appreciate that for small organizations, time and effort is proportionally more expensive than for larger organizations, so a financial contribution might be the easiest option.
I would like to thank HiveMQ for getting the ball rolling with Paho sponsorship for me.