Well... the three committer rule is (although there are exceptions for corner cases...), but we have a bit of dissonance between how we are defining "independent committer" here (http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/ Incubation_Policy.html#Minimum+Exit+Requirements) and the general Apache custom of leaving our employers "at the door" and participating as individuals who have earned their karma through individual merit and demonstrated interest. (Yes, in incubator one might argue that isn't the case always...)
It's not so much "dissonance" as an exception. In an incubating project, the developers are usually new to the ASF, and skipped the meritocracy step by virtue of association with the project before it entered Apache ("here's the list of committers"). Therefore it's reasonable to ask the incubating project to prove that not only can they write code, but they can build an active multi-participant community. If there really is still just one outside committer, then in my opinion the community has not yet passed that test; and rather than coding, those who care about that project should be advocating its existance to others, giving presentations at conferences, getting the middleware projects to support it as a peer to mysql and postgres, that sort of thing - all in the name of getting more outside involvement.
This is actually not limited to incubator projects - we've had issues before with projects whose committership was overwhelmingly from one employer. The issue wasn't the employer corrupting the decisions of the employees so much as the employees communicating privately with each other because they could, leaving out other developers; it also meant they were not incented to reduce the learning curve on the code or document internals, which would have increased outside involvement. The solution there is to slow down the pace of coding and do more community development, and ask "why are there so few other developers?". Even if the project is widely, you should ask "why are so few users of this software interested in becoming developers?".
As others have said, what the ASF cares about is healthy developer communities; good code is a resulting byproduct.
For example, we currently claim that an individuals ICLA is sufficient representation of ability to contribute. Is it? Clearly, we are implicitly stating here that it isn't - that there is some other binding on these committers by their employer that puts the project health at the risk by the employer.
No, we are not implicitly stating any such thing. We're not calling developers liars or corporate drones, even implicitly. We're saying the independent developer requirement is a litmus test for the ability of the initial developers to build a diverse community. It's awful hard to fix that later on.
In the end, I think it's a judgment call, rather than a hard and fast rule, because I would hate to have to constantly be policing projects at the ASF and sending them back to incubation if they failed to satisfy the 3 "legally independent" committer rule.
We don't "send projects back to the incubator"; the incubator is not a jail or a punitive process or the only place where community development is done. Those Who Care jump in and see what's going on if we hear something's wrong. If projects can't solve their own problems to the satisfaction of the ASF membership, the board shuts them down. Usually long, long after when it was needed. :)
Brian
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