Cutting a release jar/tarball is an individual act, regardless of the person's status as being a committer, on the PMC, or an Apache member. Because none of us are employees, we do not have the right to make acts on behalf of the ASF (the only exception is ASF officers, who are granted that right within the scope of their job description).
That is why all releases must be voted on and receive a minimum of three binding +1s (and a majority of overall votes) before the release can be made public: it is that vote which makes it a decision of the PMC, and hence a decision by the ASF. The ASF is only capable of protecting people from suits directed against the distributor when the ASF is the entity that made the decision to distribute. Note, however, that *damages* associated with copyright are tied to the act of distribution, so that is a significant benefit obtained by following the ASF's release procedures.
At the same time, it is very hard for people who might want to sue an individual (e.g., as an attempt to prevent that individual from contributing to one of our projects) to do so on the basis that the ASF violated their copyright -- instead, they would have to sue the individual for some identifiable act of copying from the expression (code) to which they own copyright and prove that their contribution to the ASF was illegal. That is not an easy thing to do, makes them vulnerable to countersuits, and requires that they prove that individual's act was responsible for some quantifiable damages. [In the US, the last part was changed by the DMCA, but I have no idea how far or if it could ever be applied in court aside from cases where the original copy is a trade secret and making a single copy is sufficient in itself to cause damage.]
Anyway, that is the theory of how it works. IANAL and this has never been tested in practice, but at the time we were particularly concerned about individual volunteers being ripe targets for a large company to bring legal action against, solely for the sake of derailing a popular project. Forcing such a company to bring suit against the nonprofit reduces their chance of success, allows us to defend ourselves collectively, and places the issue of quantifiable damages on the shoulders of a corporate entity rather than on our personal assets.
....Roy
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