On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 7:19 PM, Craig L Russell <craig.russ...@oracle.com>wrote:
> There's no ambiguity. Either you ship the bits that the Apache PMC has > voted on as a release, or you change it (one bit) and it is no longer what > the PMC has voted on. It's a derived work. > > The rules for voting in Apache require that if you change a bit in an > artifact, you can no longer count votes for the previous artifact. Because > the new work is different. A new vote is required. > Sorry, but this is just silly. Are you telling me that the httpd package in Ubuntu isn't Apache httpd? It has 43 patches applied. Tomcat6 has 17. I'm sure every other commonly used piece of software bundled with ubuntu has been patched, too. I don't see them calling their packages "Ubuntu HTTP server powered by Apache HTTPD". It's just httpd. The httpd in RHEL 5 is the same way. In fact they even provide some nice metadata in their patches, for example: httpd-2.0.48-release.patch:Upstream-Status: vendor-specific change httpd-2.1.10-apctl.patch:Upstream-Status: Vendor-specific changes for better initscript integration To me, this is a good thing: allowing vendors to redistribute the software with some modifications makes it much more accessible to users and businesses alike, and that's part of why Hadoop has had so much success. So long as we require the vendors to upstream those modifications back to the ASF, we get the benefits of these contributions back in the community and everyone should be happy. -Todd -- Todd Lipcon Software Engineer, Cloudera
