There seems to be some debate about that in the incubator lists. Some people seem to think that having jars in Apache’s svn is effectively distributing them, which is counter to the foundation’s charter of producing free software in source code form.
In my opinion, “if we aren’t distributing it, why would we have it in svn?”. It follows that if we can’t distribute anything but source (see footnote 1), we shouldn't have anything but source in the project’s repositories. If a jar is a valid build tool, one would assume it is available from whoever is running that project. Recent Incubator practice has been to ban binaries, since it is possible to download them at build time with Ant, Ivy, Maven, or just about any other build tool. Put another way, wearing my “PMC Chair” hat, as the one who is legally answerable to the board, I plan to delete the compiled jars from our svn trees as soon as possible, after we’ve ensured that the project can be built without them (probably using Ivy or requiring people to do a separate download of any additional tools that they might require). If anyone feels strongly that I’m acting in error, let me know and I’ll refer the question to either legal@ or board@. I believe there are one or two Apache Members on this list - perhaps someone could chime in? Cheers, Greg (1) I will confess to some confusion over how projects go about distributing binary releases - best I can make out is that these are “convenience binaries” that are the responsibility of whoever makes them, and we shouldn’t be voting on them or considering them “Apache” releases. On Dec 18, 2013, at 7:35 PM, Simon IJskes - QCG <si...@qcg.nl> wrote: > http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/201203.mbox/%3C0F5691A1-97C0-444F-A514-B2E4E8E907DA%40gbiv.com%3E
