As the community know Gav, in his role at infrastructure@ has
undertaken to stabilise and migrate the AOO extensions code to ASF
infrastructure. His work has been progressing and he remains committed
to completing this.
However, as some know Sourceforge made an offer to help via our
private list. At the time they did not want to discuss this topic in
public for a number of reasons. I've had a couple of chats with
Roberto Gallopini and Jeff Drobick in order to help them understand
why the ASF prefers to host all services for its projects. In response
SF have tailored their offer of support.
I relayed the outline of our conversations to the infrastructure team
who have asked me to have the AOO project provide some feedback, via a
board report, on what problems the AOO project forsee for the
extensions site and what options are available, if possible a
recommendation for an optimal solution should also be made. Note that
we can submit something out of cycle if we want, the next full report
is not due till March.
The reason infra@ have escalated to board@ is probably that we need to
figure out a long term solution for the AOO project and that solution
is heavily influenced by ASF policy. Any solution that we are
currently considering will have an impact on the AOO extensions site
and/or on ASF policy.
The current situation, as I understand it, is that the board have
given permission for the extensions site to be managed by infra during
incubation. The problem of distributing content under licences other
than Apache is not seen to be a problem during the incubation process.
Beyond incubation the board has delegated responsibility to the
Incubator PMC. I don't believe that particular discussion has been
started yet.
Gav tells us that he has been thinking about making the extensions
site an index site, thus allowing the extensions to be housed
elsewhere (apache-extras, sourceforge, google code, github, FooBar
corporation or wherever). This would neatly bypass the licence
problem. Open source extensions needing hosting could go to
apache-extras while commercially licensed extensions would need to
provide their own hosting.
An alternative is to work with a third party willing to help. I've
copied below the text of a mail outlining the SF proposal. You will
note that they are keen to ensure that we don't get locked into the SF
services. Nevertheless, one of the reasons the ASF hosts its own
services is to avoid exposing us to unmanageable risk.
I have no reason to believe SourceForge have anything other than good
intentions in making this offer. SF has been supporting open source
for a very long time. It is backed at the highest level (Jeff is
President and CEO) and I believe Roberto is known within the
OpenOffce.org community. However, many aspects of this will be outside
of the control of the AOO project, despite SFs real attempts to
mitigate our concerns relating to this.
Please note that the timescales Jeff outlines are unrealistic given
that we need to seek board input before being able to ensure the AOO
project makes the right decision. SF want to move quickly, but I
don't think we need to be rushed into making a decision.
Once you've digested and debated the offer from Sourceforge the
community needs to come up with a couple of paragraphs indicating a
desired route forwards and reasons for it. I will try and attend the
appropriate board meeting in order to answer any questions that arise.
Please be imaginative in your planning for the future. The optimal
solution might be some combination of ASF and SF offerings.
Note Roberto Gallopini has joined this list and is ready to make any
clarifications necessary. I've also made Gav aware of this post so
that he can answer any questions we have about what infra@ are able to
do.
Thanks,
Ross
--- COPIED PROPOSAL ---
I'm glad we had a chance to talk last week - exciting times for Open
Office as the product and community transition into the ASF.
For over a decade, SourceForge has been committed to advancing the
open source software community. We host over 300,000 projects and are
visited by over 40 MM users per month for free, secure, and fast
downloads of open source software. Trusted and reliable download
delivery is an important part of our service, with over 4 million
downloads per day and 2 PB from our mirror network each month. We are
committed to helping OSS projects scale and grow.
Based on our discussions, we understand there are a few things you are
solving for as part of the Open Office Incubation effort:
Supporting a diverse licensing terms for Open Office extensions, that
may not all comply with the Apache OSS policy;
Stabilizing your Drupal OO Extensions site and ensuring high
availability and download bandwidth without cost
Expanding both the developer base who will move into working on the
Apache framework as well as adoption of the Open Office product and
extensions.
We think we can help and that there would be mutual benefit. To that
end, we propose the following for your consideration:
1.) Stabilize the your OO Extensions Drupal instance by moving the it
and all services to SourceForge. Our Site Operations team will do teh
work and oversee the operations for you as we do other services. To
your community the directory will look the same and extension and
template files will move to SourceForge's globally-distributed
download mirror network where we can ensure reliable, scalable
delivery. Drupal will be hosted on our project web service, serving
your existing domain via a VHOST. Standard infrastructure
(monitoring, backups, etc.) and service levels (99.9% availability
target) apply.
These SourceForge services will be provided gratis, and without
lock-in -- you are open to change your mind later. We anticipate this
migration would involve a week of planning and preparation, followed
by a week of migration and pre/post-migration communications. We're
prepared to commence this work the next week if provided your approval
and support.
2.) Once stabilized, we will work with you on a timeline to evaluate
and execute a migration from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7.
Allowing us to host the Extensions community will solve the license
challenges - or at least give you time to work through a longer term
solution. We would also be able to cross promote the software titles
to the development community as well - so perhaps expand not only your
user base but developers.
Roberto (our Sr. Director of Business Development) has been involved
in the OpenOffice.org community for many years -- he will continue to
be your point-of-contact. If we secure the go-ahead this week, we
will start on Tuesday next week and expect to be complete by 1/15 with
step 1. I have asked our head of Site Ops to oversee the
implementation and he'll partner up with your technical folks to
ensure the hosting transition goes well.
Our motivation here is quite simple, it is all part of our mission to
help Open Source Software initiatives succeed. To that end,
SourceForge and Geeknet Media are able to fund these services and make
them free to the community through advertising largely on the download
and directory pages. So there won't ever be a charge back to your
community and we are able to reinvest in R&D on our developer tools as
well.
We look forward to hearing back from you this week if possible. Feel
free to forward this on to whomever you would like in terms of getting
to an aligned decision.
I wish you a happy new year!
--
Thank you,
Jeff
--- End of copied text ---
--
Ross Gardler (@rgardler)
Programme Leader (Open Development)
OpenDirective http://opendirective.com
