When the project was proposed, one concern that was raised on the
incubator general list was (quoting board report) "Making sure we are
comfortable with the working relationship between Qpid and the AMQP
Working Group." This concern has been posted on every board report so far.
Looking back through the posts when Qpid was accepted into incubator, it
seems clear the AMQP Working group is no more restrictive than most
other specification groups from which other Apache projects are
implementing. Cliff summarized this in one of these early posts.
{http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg09394.html}
From that mail:
(1) Licensing of the specification.
Quote from Cliff's mail "* The bad news on this is that the spec license
appears only to grant copy, display, and implement rights, not distribution.
* The good news is that I asked Carl about this today, and he says he's
surprised at that as well and expects it is only an administrative
hassle to get it fixed, but that it will happen.
* The ugly news is that the SCA spec that Tuscany is based upon seems
to have the same problem."
-->This has been addressed by an update the the license, "distribute"
has been added and M1 was released with this update.
(2) Application of the non-public specification drafts.
Quote from Cliff's mail " If a project is chartered to implement a
specification (whether in a standards body or not), I don't ever want to
see code committed to its /trunk that is fulfilling the implementation
of a private version of a specification."
--> This has been taken off the table by the working group since by
voting to make all the development public, more on this later.
(3) Openness of participation in the specification.
This is a long section in cliff mail and the thread that resulted is
even longer.... To best sum up the issue I quote from Cliff's mail again
"If an Apache project is based on a specification that is driven by a
closed set of authors, including some, but not all committers, how can
the technical decisions of the project truly be based on an open
meritocracy?"
--> the Working Group has seen individuals join the group and provide
very good feedback to the specification, so far no-one has requested
that we proceed or require/work any of the options suggested by Cliff.
If needed I can outline them.
It thus seems that the underlying question that was open at time of
acceptance into incubator was "Are those contributing to Qpid able to
interact with and view/influence information from the AMQP Working
Group?" Refreshing my memory, I have searched the Qpid lists and could
not find any issues between the Qpid project and the Working Group. I
expect that this is mainly due to the transparency of specification
process of the Working Group and the fact that all its mailing lists &
wiki pages for the specification development are public (this was not
the case when the group started). I believe that this has eliminated
most of the concerns.
As we have been working on the Qpid code base for quite some time now, I
would like to get feedback from others on Qpid regarding the ability to
get the specification and work-in-process. If those on the list are
comfortable with this issue I would like to remove it from our next
board report or address any outstanding problems.
regards,
Carl.
