I'm not going to reply to every point, many of your comments are putting words in my mouth, this is not productive. Instead I've removed all history of this conversation and instead tried to address the issues you raise with short concise statements. I hope this will serve as a summary of my advice as a mentor and will allow the community to come to a consensus.
This is not Eclipse or OW2, this is the ASF. We have a mission of producing software for the public good, that is a different mission to other organisations and thus the approach is different. What people have learned elsewhere are not necessarily going to work here. If the community does not believe that the mentors are taking you in the right direction then seek advice from the IPMC, that's what they are there for. There seems to be a confusion about what is/is not being stated here. There are three questions that I can see: 1) are ASF contributors are volunteers in the eyes of the project 2) how does Stanbol give credit to companies who pay the salaries of those volunteers 3) does Stanbol allow links without nofollow Let me state my own opinion on each of these (I stress the word opinion here, although some of my words and those of Bertrands have been taken as instruction or direction. This is not our intention unless we state explicitly that an item is non-negotiable). Decision making in the ASF is a consensus building approach. To build consensus we listen to the opinions of those who wish to state one and then make our decisions. So on each of the above questions: 1) It is fundamental to The Apache way that everyone is an individual. This part *is* written in stone. See, for example, "Individuals compose the ASF" on http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html or th About the ASF in any press release which starts "Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees..." e.g. https://blogs.apache.org/conferences/entry/apachecon_2011_announces_open_source 2) Stanbol can give credit to companies and others who employ or otherwise pay for volunteer time here. How this is handled needs to be planned out carefully. Earlier in this thread a suggestion was made by Andreas that pulled together a few ideas from this list. That seemed sensible to me. I made a couple of suggestions and Bertand also pointed to an alternative approach which is acceptable. Another example is the approach taken by Apache Wookie (incubating) which came from an EC project (see the foot of http://incubator.apache.org/wookie/) 3) I feel that nofollow is an important part of best practice here in the ASF. A link from an Apache site is of considerable value and therefore carefully managed. It is possible that this is not formal policy, it might be that this is a case of a practice that has become so prevalent that nobody has ever made it formal policy. I've simply never needed to find out whether it is even allowed. The projects I'm involved with have always decided to require nofollow. The key arguments I hear ime and again are a) sponsors are not allowed follow links b) a link from an ASF site is valuable and, as a charity producing software for the public good, we cannot benefit one company/member/committer/group/individual more than any other c) a link from the ASF is valuable and giving them to one "class" of contributor but not another creates unnecessary community tension. Each of these arguments can be read about in the various mailing list discussions I linked to The Stanbol project community makes its own decisions on most things. There are a few items that are foundational policy (such as everyone is represents themselves not their employer, see http://community.apache.org/projectIndependence.html, and the legal due diligence process on code and releases, see http://www.apache.org/dev/release.html). Here in the Incubator we provide mentors to advise the community on how to best become a sustainable Apache project. So, moving forwards, the community needs to decide what it wants to do. is one of the solutions mentioned in 2) above satisfactory? If so is the community satisfied with the advice of its mentors that nofollow is a bad idea? At this point I intend to step back and allow the community to make a decision based on the ***advice*** of your mentors. Ross
