The greatest impediment for me is having to sign a contract to participate in an open source project. I understand Rich Hickey and most of you guys live in the litigious US and have to cover yourselves, but I feel not right about this.
On Oct 19, 4:00 pm, Rich Hickey <richhic...@gmail.com> wrote: > We are taking several steps to improve contrib and the facilities used > to host Clojure development. The goal is to make it easier and more > desirable to work on the Clojure project, and encourage more libraries > to be developed within the project. > > There are several impediments to people working in or on contrib, and > within the Clojure project. The community is obviously vibrant, as > there are many independent libraries. But fewer people work on Clojure > itself or on libraries intended for inclusion in Clojure. I'd like > that to change. > > Although there have been recent efforts to make contrib more modular > from the Maven perspective (thanks Stuart Sierra!), it is still a > monolithic repo. Logically, the individual libs are more independent > than the repo structure would indicate. It should be much easier to > obtain, build, version, distribute, branch, test and modify individual > libraries. > > Some of these problems flow from historical choices made by the > project. In particular, without money, boxes and the staff to maintain > machines on the net, I chose free project hosting service providers - > first SourceForge, then Google Code, and most recently GitHub and > Assembla. In all cases, there was a tension between project and user > management and code granularity. It would have been difficult to > manage the contrib libs as independent projects/repos. > > Several things have changed recently that enable a better strategy. > GitHub has added an organization feature that lets us manage users at > the organization level and put multiple repos under the organization. > Contegix is donating a hosted box so we can run our own server (thanks > Contegix!), and the Clojure/core team now exists and is (voluntarily, > and among other things) providing much needed administrative support > (thanks Clojure/core team!). > > The New Model > > Contrib libraries will be independent repos under the Clojure GitHub > organization. All contributions to these libraries will be > contributions under the CA (therefor, no pulls). The primary authors > will have substantial independence in terms of versioning. branches > and releases etc, and it will be easy to obtain and work on a contrib > library a la carte. > > We will be moving from Assembla to a self-hosted installation of the > Atlassian suite, which they generously make available for free to open > source projects (thanks Atlassian!). It will give us a superior wiki > and bug tracking system. We will initially have support for Jira, > Confluence and FishEye, and will be able to centrally manage users > with Crowd. > > Individual contrib projects will get documentation and planning space > in the Confluence wiki, and a dedicated subproject in the Jira > tracking system. > > Contrib is not a Standard Lib > > People often ask if contrib constitutes a standard library. It has > always been a goal of contrib to support exploratory work of the > community that might or might not become part of Clojure proper, so > the simple answer is no. As volunteer open source efforts, each > library is likely to differ in quality, maturity and attention level. > In that respect, they don't differ from all of the other libraries on > GitHub. And with the new model, you will be using the same criteria in > evaluating a contrib library as you do any other open source library - > documentation, participation, recommendations, activity, stability, > bug reports etc. And you'll only consume as much of contrib as you > desire. Libraries will succeed on their merits. It is our plan to > reserve the 1.0.0+ designations for the more mature and widely > accepted libraries when they reach that point. That's as much > sanctioning as I anticipate for the near term. > > You've Got to be In it to Win it > > Why work within the Clojure project? Because you want your work to > eventually become part of Clojure and the Clojure distribution. You > want to tap into the core development effort and have an impact on it. > You are interested in collaborating on how best to make a set of > things work together in a coherent way, as Clojure does. > > Isn't the GitHub free-for-all easier? Yes, but with this new setup, > only very slightly so. The easiest thing is not necessarily the best > thing. Participating in a project involves cooperation and compromise, > and stewardship implies responsibility. > > Moving Forward > > We will be working on getting the existing contrib libraries moved > over to the new model. Meanwhile, I'm happy to announce three new and > exciting contrib libraries that are kicking off the new model: > > Chris Houser's Finger Tree -http://github.com/clojure/data.finger-tree > Chas Emerick's Network REPL -http://github.com/clojure/tools.nrepl > Michael Fogus's Unification Library -http://github.com/clojure/core.unify > > These are terrific contributions, and good examples of things that > will have the greatest impact by being part of the Clojure project. > Thanks guys! > > There are still some infrastructure things being worked out as regards > Confluence, Jira etc, and the Conj is keeping everyone busy at the > moment, but I expect this all to be in full swing shortly thereafter. > You can follow along here:http://dev.clojure.org/ > > I'm looking forward to seeing many of you at the Conj! > > Rich -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. 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