Kim,
See <http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#incubator> and <http://incubator.apache.org/> for a background on the apache incubator.
As Brian B likes to point out, we have *two* things to think about when it comes to incorporating code from / working with other communities:
1) doing the right legal thing
2) doing the right thing
It could be that we can *legally* pull in the entire JAMA code base without any involvement or support from the JAMA developers, but I at least don't think that would satisfy 2). I think that would be bad for both JAMA and us. Are we ready to support all of that code? We need to build community as well as code here and I think it would be much better to either get the code + community from JAMA to join us or to follow one of the other options that I presented below (jar dependency or limited inclusion with mutual back-porting).
Phil
Kim van der Linde wrote:
Ok, what the hell is an incubater project. I have integrated the different decompositions already to the RealMatrix and they work fine.
So, just go ahead I would say.
kim
Mark Diggory wrote:
Even if we have to go through the incubator, I'm convinced that adding the JAMA codebase into the math library is the best option. IMHO, I'm convinced that while the JAMA folks were very generous and open to providing the codebase to the public domain, that further enhancing its capabilities and providing any user support is not really in their interest. It would be far more in our interest if we forked the codebase and supported it. Any suggestion that the "JAMA folks" would have to "agree" to this is not the nature of public domain, IMO reuse of public domain doesn't require any such acknowledgment, though we should liberally acknowledge their contribution wherever possible.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&oi=defmore&q=define:public+domain
http://math.nist.gov/javanumerics/jama/
*Copyright Notice* /This software is a cooperative product of The MathWorks and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which has been released to the public domain. Neither The MathWorks nor NIST assumes any responsibility whatsoever for its use by other parties, and makes no guarantees, expressed or implied, about its quality, reliability, or any other characteristic./Note, JAMA is not a large codebase, and is in the public domain. As such, does this really require the need for an "Incubator project"?
Thanks Phil for taking such an initiative.
My $0.02, -Mark
Phil Steitz wrote:
I have gone back and forth a few times with one of the JAMA developers at NIST (Bruce Miller) and legal-discuss and have finally asked the ASF board for a ruling on whether or not we can start pulling in some JAMA code. I wanted to start with the QR class, so we can use that to get multiple regression implemented with decent numerics.
Before we start down this path, though I want to present some logical alternatives and get others' reactions to them. Rather than pulling in bits of implementation code, we could
1) Introduce a jar dependency on JAMA and wrap / extend / directly use the stuff we need. For the QR use case, there will be no performance / efficiency hit from this. For some of the other RealMatrix uses, this might be tricky.
2) Bring in the full code base. This would probably result in a side trip through the incubator and might provide the occasion to get us kicked out of commons (I am sure there are some who will be happy to see us go :-) but that might be a good thing. I don't know yet if the JAMA guys would go for this, am interested in opinions of others here.
If I get the go ahead from the board, we will need to decide between
0) fork selected stuff into [math] and pass bug fixes back and forth with JAMA
and 1) or 2). WDYT?
Note that the same considerations apply to RngPack.
Phil
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