So, I've seen some +1 votes even though no vote was announced.
What are the next steps?
- Dave
On Feb 28, 2005, at 7:27 PM, Dave Johnson wrote:
Proposal for [EMAIL PROTECTED] (prepared by Dave Johnson - Feb 28, 2005)
We the committers and friends of the open source Roller Weblogger project propose that the project become part of the Apache Software Foundation. The rest of this document explains the rationale behind this proposal, how Roller meets the Apache project scope, initial source, resources required, and initial committer criteria.
0 Rationale
Roller is an open source blog server written in Java and originally developed in 2002 for an O'Reilly article titled Building an Open Source J2EE Weblogger. Now Roller is used on multi-user blog servers at the Javalobby's JRoller.com (> 7000 blogs), Sun's blogs.sun.com (>1000 blogs), and numerous other sites. Roller is an open source product, available under an Apache-based license, with 5 committers.
Recently Sun hired the original author of Roller to develop Roller and other blog technologies. Sun and the Roller developers want to ensure Roller's continued success as a viable, growing, open source product. We think that perhaps the best way to do this is to become an Apache project.
1 Criteria
As a successful grass-roots open source project, developed by free-time freelancers, Roller should have no problem satisfying the Apache project criteria. Let's look at how Roller stacks up in terms of meritocracy, community, core developers, and alignment with Apache.
1.1 Meritocracy
New committers join the Roller project only after they have demonstrated their work by participating in the mailing lists, reporting bugs, suggesting fixes, and submitting patches. The project does not have formal voting rules but we do confer before new members are added.
1.2 Community
The Roller project itself is only made up of 5 committers, but the community also includes thousands of users using the Roller blogging software. The developer community is centered around the Roller developer mailing list and supported by Roller project blog and wiki at http://rollerweblogger.org. There are currently 135 subscribers to the Roller user mailing list, 98 to the development list, and 15 to the CVS list.
1.3 Core developers
Roller was developed by freelance developers working in their free time. The founding developer of Roller now works on Roller full-time for Sun Microsystems, but the other core developers still work on Roller as free-lancers. The core developers are all bloggers who use the Roller software.
1.4 Alignment
Roller is aligned well with Apache in terms of technologies and licensing. Roller fits in well technologically with other Apache projects, which also focuses on web, XML, and Java technologies. In fact, the Roller source code depends on a number of Apache projects including Ant, Struts, Velocity, Jakarta Commons, Jakarta Taglibs, Lucene, and Log4J.
Roller's license is essentially the Apache 1.0 license with the words Apache Software Foundation replaced by the words Dave Johnson. Roller team members do not object to changing the license to Apache 2.0 license.
2 Scope of the project
The scope of the Roller project would be the development of Roller blog server software including adding new features and improving maintainability, extensibility, performance, and scalability.
One possible way to put the project into scope is to create a top-level project for blog and newsfeed related technologies (e.g. "blogtools.apache.org"). Roller would be the first project under this umbrella, but eventually there could be projects for (or pointers to) newsfeed parsers (such as Kevin Burton's Feed Parser), blog client tools, and other blog server tools.
3 Initial source
Initial source for the project would come from the existing open source Roller project, which is currently under Apache 1.0 like license.
The initial source depends on several third-party open source components that are licensed under the LGPL. The Roller team understands these dependencies will have to be reconciled with the Apache's licensing policies. The LGPL components used by Roller are:
- Hibernate, a Java class library used for persisting Java objects in a database via O/R mapping
- Jazzy, a Java class library that provides spell checking capabilities (written by a former Roller contributor)
- JSPWiki - a Java class library used by a Roller plugin that supports Wiki syntax
4 Resources
Resources required by the Roller project:
- Source code control repository such as CVS or SVN
- Separate mailing lists for users, developers, and source code checkins
- Project home page
Roller already has a project blog and wiki at http://rollerweblogger.org and a JIRA based issue tracking system at http://opensource.atlassian.com/jira.
5 initial committers
The initial committers for Roller would be the current committers for Roller:
- Anil Gangolli (independent)
- David Johnson (Sun)
- Henri Yandell (independent, also VP of Apache Jakarta)
- Lance Lavandowska (independent)
- Matt Raible (Raible Designs)
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