Hi all, this is a draft of a proposal for a new strategy to setup an ecosystem of extranal projects related with OFBiz (OFBiz Extras).
THE GOAL * In the past from time to time we had contributors interested in working on a specific enhancement for OFBiz: because of the nature of their participation and because of the way the community works they could not become OFBiz committers and this made the collaboration more difficult * Recently a committer suggested the use of Apache Extras as a way to implement an OFBiz custom component that could not find its way in the framework * we have also a lot of code in the OFBiz trunk (framework, themes, specialpurpose and applications) that may find a better location outside of the trunk: this could slim down the codebase and in the same time help the grow of an OFBiz ecosystem. While some of the code we have is probably old and could be removed (of course it will always live in the svn history and we will also document the event somewhere) some other code may still be of some interest to a smaller audience: Apache Extras could be a good fit. THE DRAFT OF THE PROPOSAL (inspired by the references at the bottom of this page) Apache Extras is a community of open source projects related to Apache Software Foundation projects or based on their technology. It provides the infrastructure services typically required by open source projects, such as code repositories, bug tracking, project web sites/wiki. Apache Extras is hosted by Google Code Project Hosting, so it will be very familiar to developers already using Google Code Project Hosting. The projects in Apache Extras that accept to follow the rules stated below and are related to Apache OFBiz are grouped under the name "OFBiz Extras". The following rules apply to projects in the "OFBiz Extras" group: * do not include the word Apache in their name but use the name "OFBiz Extras - <name of the project>" * do not use the org.apache and the org.ofbiz namespace for their bundles or package names; exceptions to this guideline must be approved and documented through official discussion by the Apache OFBiz PMC on its public mailing lists and will be dealt with on a case by case basis (in these cases the projects could use org.ofbiz.extras) * use the Apache License 2.0 * do not include or link to any code that is not compatible with Apache License 2.0 * keep track of all contributions and ensure they are contributed under an Apache License 2.0 compatible license * discussions about the projects will happen in the project's community * an official web page in the OFBiz site will be dedicated to projects in "OFBiz Extras" * the OFBiz PMC may ask for additional requirements/constraints on a case by case basis Note: we could even drop the 3 requirements about the license: I have added them because they will be required if the project will ever want to initiate the Incubator process to become an official ASF subproject (part of OFBiz) Kind regards, Jacopo Some references: http://community.apache.org/apache-extras/faq.html http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/hosting/