The "legal shield" has been brought up by others as the reason for being so
strict on policy compliance, hence my questions.
My takeaway from your responses is that the key factors are:
1) legal right to distribute.
2) no downstream limitations on field of use.
which I agree with and see no reason to change it. However, that implies that
other policy compliance issues (missing source headers, not-quite-right
handling of LICENSE and maybe NOTICE) are not showstoppers and can be addressed
in a future release, and that would save time not only for podlings, but for
TLPs as well.
Then the main decision point for this thread is whether to allow podlings more
slack on #2 given their artifacts are appropriately labelled and disclaimed.
Could an incentive be offered to podlings that if their release complies with
both #1 and #2 that they can remove the -incubating label when copying the
artifacts to dist.a.o?
Thanks,
-Alex
On 6/10/19, 11:13 AM, "Ted Dunning" <ted.dunn...@gmail.com> wrote:
The content of a release and the downstream limitations on field of use are
not a matter of legal shield. It has always been the case that the
fundamental promise of Apache has been that Apache software is easy and
safe to adopt and use.
Easy and safe meaning that you won't have nasty surprises like somebody
suing you for "being evil" or, worse, having your own lawyers veto a
critical release because a dependency of a dependency is GPL licensed or is
restricted from being used in anything that competes with smart plumbing
accessories.
Getting the foundation to relax that attitude of no downstream restrictions
is going to be nearly impossible.
On Sun, Jun 9, 2019 at 10:53 PM Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com.invalid> wrote:
> There's been a lot of discussion on relaxing requirements, but I don't
> recall any long-time ASF person explaining how fragile or durable the
> legal-shield and the insurance rates for it are.
>
> ...
>
> Unless someone can explain why that would ruin the legal-shield or raise
> insurance rates, I think that would save lots of community time getting
> releases out. Otherwise, we might be expending precious energy
> overzealously trying to protect a legal-shield that doesn't need that
level
> of protection.
>
> Does anybody truly know what will and will not ruin the legal-shield? I
> have to imagine that releases have been shipped by the ASF and later found
> to be non-compliant with policy and that didn't ruin the legal shield or
> raise insurance rates.
>
