On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 1:22 AM, Ted Husted <[email protected]> wrote:
> The ASF doesn't need to be all things to all people. There are plenty of
> places where open source projects of any size can live. The ASF is designed
> to encourage collaboration, and collaboration implies critical mass.

for an apache TLP, yes - of course a critical mass is required

the rule-of-three is the minimum possible scale for the apache
development, not that critical mass. graduates from the incubator are
only required to have this minimum. they have the potential to achieve
critical mass but that's all.

but there is no requirement that collegiate development requires the
development of only a single product. successful projects often spawn
multiple products as useful code is factored into libraries and
management tools are built on top.

going forward into the next ten years, one problem facing the ASF is
the need to preserve it's ecology. projects are created in great
profusion. they are born, live then die.

a few become important dependencies for apache projects. when the
maintainers stop maintaining them, apache needs to find a way to pick
up these projects and continue development.

forking a GPL project is easy - the viral license means no paperwork
is really required

forking a permissively licensed project is more difficult. apache
needs the paperwork (CLAs and grants). other software forges do not
insist on this paperwork. safely forking a project which is not hosted
at apache would be difficult.

for products which are used by apache projects and which are developed
primarily by apache committers, this means hosting the code here at
apache will be an advantage going forward.

- robert

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