HI, Just a couple of questions below for people to ponder and I think it worth having a discussion on list about this. I don’t think having this external repo is a bad idea or against ASF policy but long term it could harm the project. For instance only contributions to the Apache project can be considered when voting committers or PMC members in. So contribution to the eco system doesn't accrue merit in the project eyes. You may run into licensing and other IP issues without ICLA to cover all contributions. Projects in the eco system may not follow the release or other ASF policies. I can see that several already don’t follow the ASF licensing policy, which is OK as they are not ASF projects, but if you want to use them with Dubbo that could cause issues. You see the sort of issues that could occur here?
What do other mentors think about this? > Justin, this is dubbo eco system, including some artifacts built against > dubbo extension machanism, polyglot support, samples, scaffold, etc., which > are apparently not suitable to put in dubbo's main project. Why is it not suitable? You can create multiple repos at Apache. The project can have multiple projects and release them on different schedules. > It is a long term goal to build up eco system around dubbo as rich as > possible, and it is a common practice to attract more developers and > contributors, Why wouldn’t that be done at Apache rather than external to it? By attracting developers and contributed to the eco systems you are removing them as potential committers in Apache Dubbo. > for example: https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem. Besides, > right now GitHub doesn't support 2nd level group like > github.com/apache/dubbo. Why is that needed? Do you really need a two tier community model? > If the only problem is ICLA, we could ask the corresponding contributor (in > fact, a member in dubbo group) to sign it when the community see the > necessity to move his/her works back into apache group. No that not the only issue (see above) and you would probably need to get all contributors to sign and it can be hard to track them all down. Employment contracts may also become an issue regards who owns the IP. What if it turns out a contributor didn’t actually own their contributions? Thanks, Justin
