Hello, Henri,
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I'm dividing my reply across two emails;
this one to cover what kind of product might emerge from this discussion and
where it might live, and the other to cover content.
On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 01:01:24AM -0700, Henri Yandell wrote:
> It's a meritocracy; by stepping up with this email you've already
> started the project. Stay quietly persistent and keep it going (and I
> don't see why it can't stay on community@).
At some point, I'd like to see this sample open source policy published on an
ASF website. I can think of three potential homes for it: legal affairs, dev,
and community.
It seems plausible that legal affairs might be consulted at some point, but I
think this policy is distinct from its mission. Legal affairs is concerned
with activities that involve the ASF and IP licensed to the ASF directly. The
adoption of this sample policy would govern the relationship between a company
and its employees; the ASF would not be involved. It's akin to projects
outside the ASF using the Apache License or our CLAs...
http://www.apache.org/foundation/licence-FAQ.html#My-License
http://www.apache.org/foundation/licence-FAQ.html#CLA-Usage
... except that the ASF would never actually use this document. Legal affairs
expertise is a limited resource, and if we don't have skin in the game, I'm
hesitant to suggest that it live there.
For similar reasons, www.apache.org/dev might not be ideal. The dev site is
aimed at individual developers contributing to the ASF and engaging in ASF
governance activities. The target audience for this document would be IT
management. It might be brought to the attention of management by developers
who want to contribute to the ASF, but the there's a huge amount of material
on the dev site that wouldn't be relevant for the people we'd want to reach.
I've looked around the community.apache.org website, and while there is not an
obvious home for it there, it's an interesting question whether a place could
be carved out for it. Trawling through email archives, past board reports,
and blog entries, I see that coordinating Google Summer of Code has been a
major focus, and that questions have been asked like "How might we attract
more technical writers to the ASF?". This seems like a similar outreach
activity, intended to bring more people to the ASF and make it easier for them
to contribute.
Perhaps if we can craft a document of suitable quality, the Community PMC
could be persuaded to assume responsibility for publishing it and voting to
"release" it once it becomes mature enough. Call it the "Apache Community
Open Source Policy 0.1"?
> Find a wiki and start documenting. :)
I'm inclined to compile a draft/outline and open a JIRA issue. There has been
enough material in this thread to get started.
I don't think the policy itself should be developed on a wiki because we'd
potentially get contributions from people without CLAs on file, and I'd like
the ASF to have full freedom to use the material that comes out this process.
(I'm sure you of all people grok the licensing limitations of wiki documents,
though, so I've probably misunderstood your suggestion.)
Cheers,
Marvin Humphrey
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