On 3/21/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I, for one, would never recommend to any business enterprise that they > use Struts for important applications if the source was not vetted and > controlled by a small, trusted committee. Your needs may not have such > requirements for trustworthiness.
In the case of the Apache Software Foundation, we do take intellectual property very seriously. Before receiving an account, each committer must file with the ASF a "Contributor's License Agreement". In this way, when we make a commit, we legally donate the code to the ASF, which is a not-for-profit US corporation. It is the ASF's intention to have clear title to all the code in our repository, both for its benefit and for the benefit of the people who make use of ASF code. As the sole owner of the code, the ASF can also afford the individuals on the PMC some legal protection, since we act as agents of the ASF. We do encourage non-committers to submit patches, and we take care to credit each person's contribution in the repository log when we make the commit. Depending on the nature of the contribution, we may ask someone to file a CLA, even if he or she is not a committer. Many of the best features in Struts came from people who, at the time, were not committers. The Validator, for example, as well as Tiles. Features like the DispatchAction, roles-based authentification, declarative exception handling, among many others were contributed to the project by non-committers. Most recently, opt-in cancel handling came in as a patch from a non-committer, after a lengthy discussion of the best way to solve the problem. Many ideas went into the patch, contributed by committers and non-committer alike. * http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=38374 For more on contributiing to the project, see * http://struts.apache.org/helping.html Sadly, there are occasions when we cannot offter committer status to an individual. Usually, it is not because there is a problem with hsi or her code, but because all committers participate in the decision-making process. We don't have any peon-committers. Every committer is considered on track to become a PMC member, with a binding vote on releases and other matters. In turn, some committers and PMC members also become ASF members. The ASF members are the "stakeholders" of the corporation and elect the board of directors. While ASF projects have a reputation for voting, most decisions are made through informal discussions on the dev mailing list. Someone commits some code, and the rest of us peer-review the change (by following the commit list). Usually, that's the end of it, but any PMC member can veto a product change if need be. It's rare that a PMC member will abuse his or her veto power, but it does happen. On one occasion, the board did have to strip an individual's commit privileges. But, given that there are almost two thousand (2,000) ASF committers now, working on more than thirty top-level projects, that seems like a pretty good batting average :) We also take project management seriously. Every project has a designated "Chair" who is a vice-president of the foundation. The Chair/VP must tender a status report to the board on at least a quarterly basis, to be sure the project remains vital and collaborative. For more about how the ASF (and by extension Apache Struts) works, see * http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html -Ted. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
