Ripple is critical for the Windows eco system as it give us a great way to try our and build for multiple platforms. There are also multiple tools and IDEs for Cordova that use Ripple as a way to test the deployments. We have an open pull request and are also working on another set of pull requests for Ripple.
Regardless of if it continues as a top level project of Apache or is folded into Cordova, Ripple would continue to be critical to us and we would like to continue contributing to the project. If you need help with reviewing pull requests or fixing bugs, we could take that up too. As Andrew mentions, we could also explore the possibility of how this could live in an ecosystem where we have things like the app harness and cordova browser. On a side note, does it make sense to make Ripple another platform, just like iOS, Android or Windows? Given that a lot of people use Ripple in projects that also have plugins, it may make sense for plugins to atleast provide some sort of mock data for Ripple, making Ripple useful with plugins that are not already supported. -----Original Message----- From: Christian Grobmeier [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2014 10:52 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Discuss] The Future of Ripple as a Top Level ASF Project hi folks, On 22 Apr 2014, at 16:30, Brent Lintner wrote: > However, it is also apparent that the community does not seem large > enough to sustain a project like this as a top level project (let > alone an individual PMC). ... > 1. We find more community members willing to lead committership of the > project, and see how that goes. possible this happens, but unlikely: if there is no activity it seems people are not attracted to help that much. > 2. We also consider the eventuality of folding Ripple into another ASF > project, if possible. If so, it would seem Cordova is a candidate for > this, especially given the project being one of Ripple's main focus > and support. > If the community votes for this, we should involve the Cordova > community to gage their interests as well (I've CC'd their mailing > list in this email). At the ASF we don't want umbrella projects. But in this case I really see the most interested party in Ripple is the Cordova project. It looks like Ripple can't succeed on a project on its, just because there are not enough PMC members available. Three are must, but its better to have 5 or 6. That said, the project is not dead so I would prefer to see the current active committers added to the Cordova committership. > 3. If the above does not work out, I would then suggest we consider > the most unfortunate (put perhaps prudent) eventuality, which is to > "fail" > Ripple as an incubator project. "fail" is this case, not being > negative. > > And, if it does fail incubation- what does ASF normally do with the > project? > > Does it get donated back to the original party? Does it get moved to > an open source project outside of ASF (under a different license)? In the incubator terminology there is no "fail", there is just a retirement :-) It would mean the project svn is put to read only and the websites are removed. A status page would indicate its current state. New committers can try to revive the project at any time. Everybody is welcome to fork the project - and even come back later to the ASF. However there is one restriction: usually the ASF keeps the trademark "Apache Ripple". There were a few exceptions in the past when the project could keep its trademark and continue outside the ASF (like Zeta Components). That being said, the community could surely decide to retire here, move the code to GitHub and continue there. The formal things (like reports) are gone then, but I am afraid GitHub is not the cure for Ripple. My personal preference is due to the fact that Cordova committers and Ripple committers already seem to overlap, to just move the project to Cordova. Of course the Cordova project would then still need to take care about the formal aspects of Ripple. In example, check if there are copyright protected images in there, or if everything is well with dependencies. This certainly requires some amount of work and if there is nobody willing to perform this work... This work would be necessary to do in GitHub as well, but well. Cheers Christian > > Any insight would be appreciated! > > -- > Brent Lintner --- http://www.grobmeier.de The Zen Programmer: http://bit.ly/12lC6DL @grobmeier GPG: 0xA5CC90DB
