Hey Michael! Thanks for the detailed response about your position, thoughts, concerns, and philosophy. It helps greatly to understand where you're coming from. Rather than debate you on your philosophy ;-) ... I'll answer a few key points in your email below:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 10:07, Michael Meeks <michael.me...@novell.com> wrote: >... > To pick off individual contributors from TDF is of course possible. > There may well be some who have no problem with corporations, that > apparently have zero respect for the will of the developer community, > and little desire to play well: taking their work without contributing > back. To pick off individuals however is a rather unfortunately > pro-active strategy, I assume you are not proposing that ? I would hope that we don't start a "sales pitch" towards TDF/LO committers to stop contributing there. I *do* think it is helpful to let them know about this proposal, the potential project, and that they are welcome to contribute. Yes, I understand that will divide the set of committers. I do not believe that it will divide the *broader* community. From everything that I've seen, you guys have been managing multiple divisions for *years*. One more probably can't be bad :-P, though i believe that our permissive licensing will help to bring some of those outlying forks back into the tighter community. > I would hope instead, that ASF + IBM can work with TDF's governance to > try to hammer out some ( I suspect grisly to ASF ) compromise. In my > view, a key element of that needs to be copy-left licensing[2] to assure > the project's future as a focus of real community collaboration. Well... the ASF will never ship anything besides ALv2 code. No dual licenses. No extra conditions. We would shut down a project rather than alter that licensing stance. It's been asked a few times over the years, and the firm stance has remained each time. > > Regards, > > Michael. > > [1] - I am un-aware eg. of either Rob or Andy ever contributing any code > to OO.o (or having any broad / deep knowledge of the code-base). A > strange choice, given the apparent presence of many articulate, > competent, experienced developers on the code in each company any of > whom would have been better. I can't speak to why IBM has given Rob this task, but I see no reason to immediately disqualify him. We need people with energy to get the project off the ground. Then we'll need coders. > [2] - perhaps we could avoid that by mandating that every participant > merging a patch to OO.o sign a covenant that requires them to behave in > an identical fashion to a copy-left license, in perpetuity: but then, > that would further reward those who don't engage at all I guess, and ... > well - seems over-complicated to me :-) but perhaps a way out (or in) Committers to Apache projects own their code. We do not require a copyright transfer. That means they can apply the patch to the ASF repository under the terms of the ALv2, then turn around and commit exactly the same code into the TDF repository under your licensing. I don't know of the (theoretical) Apache project would want to impose such conditions (dual-commit on its contributors, but I guess it could be possible. But then what do you do with the ones who *don't* want to dual-commit? Tell them they cannot participate? I'd prefer a much more inclusive process... one that lets everybody join and participate. Cheers, -g --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
