On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 3:14 AM, Jean Hollis Weber <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 2011-08-04 at 10:22 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: > >> The other set of concerns I had was with respect to content license. >> Today we seem to have a mix of 4 different licenses for contributed >> content, as well as content that does not have any evident license >> attached to it. I realize cleaning up the past is nearly impossible, >> But is there anything we can do better going forward? >> >> In particular, please note that I'd like to encourage IBM >> contributions of documentation to the project, along with our Symphony >> work. For example, we have doc related to enterprise deployment and >> this is applicable to OpenOffice as well as Symphony. But if we >> contribute this under Apache 2.0 and then it is edited by anonymous >> (or pseudonymous) users who have not signed the iCLA, then our >> contributions can be immediately contaminated by unlicensed (or >> incompatibly licensed) changes, making it impossible for us to use >> future revisions of own doc. As you can imagine, that would make it >> very difficult for us, or any other corporation, to collaborate on >> documentation. >> >> So that's the essential trade-off. If we require iCLA for substantial >> content contributors, then you will cause some contributors to stop >> participating But if you don't require an iCLA, then you will inhibit >> participation from corporations. And note that this is true for all >> reusable content in the project. So code, help, documentation and >> translations. If we want participation from corporations then we need >> to have the means to establish and maintain the pedigree of the >> contributions under a consistent license (or set of compatible >> licenses). > > I see your point, and I think it's a very important one. If this > particular aspect had come up earlier in the discussion, then I missed > it. > > I thought the idea was to have two wikis, one for (among other things) > "official documentation" that requires contributors to sign the iCLA, > and the other for "community documentation" that does not. It would seem > to me that the items you described fit into the "official docs", while > much (I suspect the majority) of the existing OOo wiki contents fits > more into "community docs", with the few "official" docs on the existing > wiki either under the Oracle brand and appropriate license or > essentially obsolete (for example, the wiki version of the user guides, > which only go up to v3.2). > > If this is the case, then it seems to me there is no real problem. > Simply apply different rules to the two wikis. What am I missing? >
The problem is that we don't have two wikis today with OOo. We have one, and it has material that probably should be considered "official", as well as other material. Let's look at a few examples on the wiki: Page on performance tuning initiatives in OOo: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page The editors of this page are almost entirely Sun and RedFlag employees. It directly concerns plans and approaches to modifying the code. This isn't really doc at all. But I don't think it is "community" either. Performance tuning is a core development function. In every other Apache project information like this would be part of the core project.apache.org website, where developers would most likely look for it. Similar examples: Detailed information on building OOo: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Building_Guide Project on improving the build envrionment: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Build_Environment_Effort Overview of the OOo architecture: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture Maybe I'm too skeptical, but do we really have thousands of non core project members dropping in for minutes at a time, adding information on the architecture of OOo? And build instructions? Looking at the history of these pages, it looks more like this is core dev-enabling information that should be part of the core project website. Maybe you can give me some examples of pages that you think are community-developed, should remain that way, but are not valuable enough to users that they should be in the official doc set? So I'm happy to have two wikis, one that is a sandbox for wider experimentation. And another one where we can migrate stable, mature, valuable material into a location for an official release. (Some material might even originate in the official wiki). But for this to happen, I think we'd need a few capabilities first: 1) Two wikis under the same platform. Having Confluence for our developer wiki and MediaWiki for the community wiki won't work. We need compatibility. 2) Apache 2.0 (or compatible category-A license) for all new content on the community wiki. This is needed in order to move it eventually into an official doc set, 3) A search that spans the two wikis. Maybe Google custom search is enough. Maybe there is a better way. 4) An easy way to migrate content from the community site to the official site. 5) A clear notice made on the OpenOffice.org website, as to where the official doc is. > --Jean > > > >
