Benson, You honed in on PRECISELY the 2 points I was trying to make. Thanks for making them so succinctly. One thing I will comment on explicitly (read below):
On Dec 30, 2011, at 7:52 AM, Benson Margulies wrote: > There are two aspects of this situation that I want to highlight: > > First, there's a policy tension at the heart of the whole Apache > Extras concept that has me puzzled. > > I could point to a raft of messages from board members expressing > extremely vehement views in opposition to 'circumventing license > restrictions via github.' The idea that a PMC might take active steps > to put code elsewhere to address license restrictions was, at least in > the rhetorical moments in question, anathema. Having read that email, > if I were a PMC chair, I wouldn't what's proposed here without an > explicit board approval. The implicit policy on 'extras' seemed to be > that it was a place for outsiders to park code that, for whatever > reason, wasn't contributable -- NOT a place for PMCs to park code that > couldn't live in Apache source control. Your "for whatever reason that wasn't contributable" to me is precisely a reason to "park code that couldn't live in Apache source control". The reason it wouldn't be able to live there in my case is that it has compilation and run-time dependencies on LGPL code. And yes, I recall the Apache Extras discussion on board@ and among the members. It doesn't seem like it was a shoe-in for clarity. And, it confused the crap out of me this past few days and turned out to be a red herring for what I was actually looking for. > > Second, I wonder about the proposed governance and logic of this whole > 'java package id rules' business. Here's a scenario: someone from > outside Apache fills out the form, creates a project, and *forks some > Apache project into it.* Bingo, 'org.apache.*'. What group of > volunteers is signed up to notice and police this? For that matter, > are we quite sure that the policy is a good idea? Package IDs in java > tend to be sticky, to avoid pointless incompatibility. How can we say > to people, 'The Apache license says that you can do whatever you want > with this code -- except fork it at our affiliated site?' > org.apache.oodt is not a trademark, at least, I sure hope it isn't. If > we're going to try to control it on apacheextras, don't we need to go > bugging every fork of every project on github? Bingo. I made this point in conversations with Greg Stein, and with Noirin and Mark S. and Christian and others on this list. I agree with Ross though -- it's a trademarks@ issue (which is why I'm glad they are CC'ed) :-) Summarized point: why are we trying to even have a policy that we will waste our volunteer time policing (potentially our own members but also) folks on our-supposedly-associated-with-our-organization-site-but-not-really Apache Extras (and other places like Github, etc.) who use org.apache Java namespaces (which aren't trademarked)? Cheers, Chris ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. Senior Computer Scientist NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246 Email: chris.a.mattm...@nasa.gov WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
