On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 10:02 PM, Roy T. Fielding <field...@gbiv.com> wrote:
> I don't follow that. Is Edgewall still a formal organization capable
> of owning copyright? If not, who owns the copyright? Have Christian
> and Remy stopped all work on Trac, or are they just busy with their $jobs?
>
Yes, Edgewall is still a formal organization capable of owning copyright.
(Aside: it's not entirely clear to me at the moment how much copyright
Edgewall owns over the Trac codebase, vs. whether individual Trac
contributors retain the copyright to their own contributions[1].)
Christian and Remy have not stopped all work on Trac. They are still, at
least, reviewing and merging patches. Other core committers (newer
contributors, and contributors with partial repository access) are also
committing changes[2].
Separately, I do want to point out that the most recent statements from
WANdisco's David Richards and Gary Martin on trac-dev and bloodhound-dev
are encouraging, and clearly indicate an interest in developing Bloodhound
as a downstream Trac distribution with patches maintained separately
(presumably without official Apache copyright and licensing) and submitted
upstream. As far as I've seen, everybody in the Trac community is fully
supportive of this, as well as appreciative.
That said, it would probably be best if the official Bloodhound proposal
were modified to correct the mischaracterizations about the Trac community,
and to replace the explicit plans for a Trac fork ("Migrate the existing
BSD-licensed Trac code base to the ASF" etc) with a clear description of
the new approach including how the upstream patches, plus their copyright
and licensing, will be managed. (As an Apache newcomer I have no idea
whether this would require or merit a new VOTE.)
I think that if/when these details are clearly ironed out, all the
fundamental short-term issues will be resolved. Longer-term concerns
expressed by WANdisco (copyright protection, non-conflicting visions, a
core velocity that does not impede downstream development) and the Trac
community (upstream contributions, symbiotic communities, increased burdens
of knowledge management for core devs // plugin authors // users) can then
hopefully be tackled and reevaluated during the incubation process.
-Ethan
[1] https://groups.google.com/group/trac-dev/msg/cfbf54981ad64138
[2]
http://trac.edgewall.org/timeline?from=Jan+10%2C+2012&daysback=30&authors=&changeset=on&update=Update
