On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 10:41:03PM -0500, William A. Rowe Jr. wrote: > "the policies", hmmm. Those would be 'your policies'. Which may or may not > be what Marvin is attempting to compose. Your form of evangelism could be > counterproductive to the audience who Marvin is addressing.
I'm grateful to Keith for advocating that usage should be covered by the policy. The high-level organization of the draft has been modified accordingly. This Policy document will stand on its own regardless of the intentions of those who participate in its drafting. Nevertheless, a primary motivation of mine is to increase business usage and sponsorship of open source software. I believe that's a win all around -- for businesses, for the ASF, for the software industry at large, and for individual contributors. In my opinion, it's important that the Policy make only one major distinction: between open source software and proprietary software. As a practical matter, advocating for particular technologies seems likely to alienate people at companies who have invested in competing technologies. Ideally, we would like this Policy to be as influential as possible, and to be adopted as widely as possible; anything that limits its audience is detrimental. Even advocating for particular licenses seems likely to to be a net negative. There is a place for such evangelism. I believe, as I imagine many others here do, that it is in the interest of businesses to invest in liberally licensed open source such as ASF projects as opposed to copyleft projects. But this document shouldn't be a vehicle for those opinions. It seems to me that a technology-agnostic, license-agnostic policy which establishes rules equally applicable to all open source projects properly reflects the values and traditions of the ASF as a "universal donor". This Open Source Policy should fit comfortably into a wide variety of contexts, just like our software. Marvin Humphrey --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: community-unsubscr...@apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: community-h...@apache.org
