Hi, Justin,
It is good to meet you. Thank you for taking the time to respond.
- Apache has a no dictator rule (friendly or otherwise), given there’s a
person who may be in that role currently in the project, are they fine
with giving up control to the rest of the community?
Yes, I am fine with giving up control. I have been doing this for a
very long time (probably daily for 15 years) and I am perfectly happy
with others taking the lead. So far all of the people who have been
interested are of the highest technical caliber and I have complete
confidence that they can share the leadership roles.
- The contributors may need to sign ICLAs. Given the number of people
involved and the age of the project, if this ia required, it might be
difficult.
Some of the files are so old that it may not be possible to even contact
all of the authors. I am the committer on all files and also listed as
the author in the CM systems up to a few years ago (other people are
given credit only in ChangeLogs and ReleaseNotes). Most have given
copyright rights to me. Is it the author, the committer, or the
copyright holder that matters here?
- Given the large number of committers, I expected the initial committer
list to be much larger, have you considered inviting all of the major
committers?
No one but I can commit to the existing repositories so I am the
committer of everything. The names are not actually committers, but
authors from the git commit --author= argument. In the early years CVS
and SVN were used and in the early GIT years, I did not yet know about
the --author= option. So you can clearly see when I discovered
--author= in the data at:
https://bitbucket.org/nuttx/nuttx/addon/bitbucket-graphs/graphs-repo-page#!graph=contributors&uuid=d90bf438-7869-4921-8926-fd25b0901043&type=c&group=weeks
Maybe around 2015?
- What does the community as a whole think abut this move? I can see
this here [1], but I was a little surprised there wasn’t more public
discussion about this. Is there consensus that they want to join the ASF
and understand what that means?
I have only heard positive things lately. There was some grumbling
about changing the licenses some time back, but I think we are past
that. Many people had the mistaken impression that the Apache license in
some way put more burden on the end-user. The complexity of the
language used in the license is a barrier to many people.
- Is the community aware of some of the issues they may encounter in
moving to ASF infrastructure and doing things in an Apache Way? (release
process usually being the main difference).
They are aware superficially but I don't think most appreciate the full
implications.
If there were not a full PMC supporting the project then it would be a
problem for me as well. With the PMC we should be able to share the
load. I have done 133 releases of NuttX alone. I am hoping to be
replaced with a more Apache-savvy release manager. I would prefer to be
this assistant, advisor / helper / mentor on most of the PMC issues.
- I notice you mention BSD-4 cause in you list of licenses, this is
actually Category X and not compatible with the ALv2 license. However
if it is what I think it is, it easy to work around (as we did for
Mynewt).
There are a few, very old 4-clause BSD files in the C library (leveraged
from old, old BSD C library files). Don't copyrights have a shelf life
like patents? I am sure that these are too old to be an issue because
the copyrights have expired anyway. This should be all of them:
$ find . -name *.c | xargs grep " California, Berkeley"
./fs/nfs/rpc_clnt.c: * University of California, Berkeley and its
contributors. 4. Neither the
./libs/libc/stdio/legacy_dtoa.c: * California, Berkeley and its
contributors.
./libs/libc/stdio/lib_libdtoa.c: * California, Berkeley and its
contributors.
./libs/libc/stdlib/lib_bsearch.c: * California, Berkeley and
its contributors.
./libs/libc/stdlib/lib_qsort.c: * California, Berkeley and its
contributors.
$ find . -name *.h | xargs grep " California, Berkeley"
./fs/nfs/rpc.h: * California, Berkeley and its contributors.
Six files. That is basically just the RPC logic in NFS client and some
pieces of the C library. bsearch() and qsort() probably have
replacements with other licenses. dtoa() probably does not.
If the proposal does come to the Incubator, (and the project thinks I'm
a good fit), I can help out as a mentor. I‘m mentored a number of IoT
projects here at Apache, including Mynewt.
That is very good news! Thank for that.
I spoke with the Mynewt folk a couple of years back about incorporating
some their IoT components into NuttX a few years back. Licensing was an
obstacle then, but times are changing.
Greg
