--- Tim Ruppert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > > I reviewed patches for Anil and Ashish - that is correct. There's no > > fancy partnership here - nor is there any any legal concern, but > that's truly not what this discussion should be about. > <snip>
You're absolutely correct that there isn't a _fancy partnership present. The partnership created is the same mundane one that is created every day. I must disagree with you, it is of GREAT legal concern. Since you obviously did not follow the link of background information I provided David in my reply, I'll take a quote from a section of http://library.findlaw.com/1999/Jan/1/241478.html 'According to the Copyright Act, the authors of a joint work jointly own the copyright in the work they create. A joint work is defined in Section 101 of the Copyright Act as "a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole."' "When the copyright in a work is jointly owned, each joint owner can use or license the work in the United States without the consent of the other owner, provided that the use does not destroy the value of the work and the parties do not have an agreement requiring the consent of each owner for use or licensing. A joint owner who licenses a work must share any royalties he or she receives with the other owners." If this doesn't sound like what you did with Anil and Ashish, read it again. If it doesn't sound dangerous, read it again and then _again and then consider whether releasing something as "open source" destroys the value of the work. It does, there is no doubt about it. Since a joint owner who license a work must share any royalties he or she receives with the other owners, guess what, the owners must share the liability that a joint owner creates regarding that work. A _fancy partnership would spell out who and how the joint work can be distributed and be agreed to in writing and the extent to which the other joint owners can accept liability on behalf of the class of joint owners. The _fancy partnership would protect us all. > 1. There already is an SVN for managing the OFBiz Yes, and IMO the only things that should go into that project are tested contributions that can hopefully be the basis of what someone can run their business off of. Half tested, half implemented ideas should be in a sandbox SVN so that the community can get them ready for the parent project. > 2. You will have to manage mods to the trunk in patches regardless - > > unless you'd want to go with some vendor branch scheme, which in my > experience is WAY more trouble than it's worth. The sandbox isn't suggesting a branch or a branch structure, so there's no trouble. Since the two options are neutral in comparrison in how they get re assimilated into OFBiz, we should only concern ourselves in the easiest manner to incorporate the contribution into the teams (using someone else's word). That is SVN by a long shot over JIRA patches. > 3. Why can't you play on your own box like the rest of us - and only > > submit (or commit) when you have something to say that you want > reviewed or to be shared? That is the whole point of the discussion, no one is playing on their own box. You, Anil and Ashish aren't, the ofbiz-sandbox project on sourceforge would not be and the proposed platform of the developers conference will not be. Currently, the only _safe manner for a non committer to collaborate on his own box is to download from Apache Ofbiz, upload to JIRA, have your collaborator download from JIRA, make sure the patch works because you two may be using different revisions make changes then upload to JIRA, you download from JIRA, make sure the patch works because you two may be using different revisions and so on... Committers only have the additional benefit of using labs.apache.org or trunk instead of patches. This limits their possible collaborators to other committers. > Chris, know that I feel you here, but why don't we just try this and > > see how it goes? If you end up having a huge following for these > types of things, then I'll be the first person backing you and doing > > the leg work to put more infrastructure in place will be most > beneficial. I've been trying it in the manner suggested by David in my spare time for the past two years. Other's aren't so patient and have simply moved on. And yes, it does work somewhat, but it could work a lot better and without us having to cross our fingers, hoping no one tries to sabotage the project. Depending on your definition of "huge" it already exists. (this also answers someone's question earlier on who the groups were) 1. Those wanting to develop google checkout has code, but has been lost because Phani apparently has since stopped monitoring the mailing lists. 2. Those wanting more modularization between the components has code, not sure where to contribute it because of the legal scenario 3. The upcoming developer's "hackathon" will undoubtedly have code and will be contributed in a manner that is subject to all the questions I have been asking. 4. Those wanting to refactor the create order process has code, been contributed to JIRA, though because it's a patch will only attract those that are _really committed to the topic and not those that have a passing interest. 5. Jonathon's rag tag team Jonathon claims it has lots of code 6. Anil and Ashish's asset management that's utilizing code.google.com/hosting has 54 revisions, I don't know Anil's and Ashish's relationship, but it would appear that it will need to answer the same legal questions I've been asking to make it back into the project. 7. I understand Daniel K is wanting to collaborate on something I think he's wanting to learn by doing, but I don't know specifically what he has in mind at this point. 8. Those that responded they wanted to help get Asterisk PBX integration Code in SVN. Has functionality but could blow the socks off of someone with some collaborative work 9. Those wanting to refactor PartyRelationship has code, at the moment has gotten too specific to be beneficial to the community 10. Those wanting to collaborate on Business Intelligence there's a writeup on docs.ofbiz.org on how to kind of integrate openi with ofbiz. Someone contributed a bit of code, I believe to the ML. And Si Chen had made mention of completing some OLAP cubes based on the openi writeup These are just the instances I can think of off the top of my head. There's my huge following, so where's your backing? Regards, Chris
