On 31/07/2011, at 6:04 AM, Benson Margulies wrote: > Kristian, > > legal-discuss is a public list, with public archives. You can go read > these remarks for yourself in the archive. I apologize for assuming > that you or anyone else didn't know that. Yes I am a member, but Ralph > and I are not quoting any private crap. > > Note that some Ralph posed a relatively specific legal question to > start with, and then it grew and grew into a more complex policy > discussion that board members happened to participate in. If you want > a clear statement of the board's view, you can ask the board. The > board in general would, I bet, rather get a coherent question from the > PMC chair in the monthly report, and deal with that, but nothing stops > you from sending email to board@ stating your view of the question at > hand and asking for clarification.
That's all true. I noticed a few people talk about "board policy" in this thread, and I think it's important to be clear on a couple of things. Board policy is nowhere near as heavy handed as some here may think - in particular, the board does not dictate any technical direction for a project. In the interest of protecting the Foundation, they will however ensure that all legal obligations are being met, that a project has a healthy development community, and that it is aligned with the principles of the ASF. As far as I can tell, these are all the policies relevant to this discussion: http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html#3party http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-a http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-b http://maven.apache.org/developers/dependency-policies.html The statements made on legal-discuss have some significant weight given who made them, though I don't think they intended them to be ad-hoc policy making on behalf of the board. The comments were not so much policy setting as they are just common sense. Don't risk the project by bringing in a codebase that the main copyright holder doesn't want you to. Don't let a major piece of functionality be developed outside of the project in the first place. I will specifically mention that as a board member myself, my comments on this list should not be treated as a statement from the board unless I've said otherwise :) Cheers, Brett -- Brett Porter [email protected] http://brettporter.wordpress.com/ http://au.linkedin.com/in/brettporter --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
