On 11/14/12 9:30 AM, "Omar Gonzalez" <omarg.develo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've kept quiet about this initiative until now, but, what seems odd to me
> is the idea of someone trying to profit off of developing a component, in
> private (I'm assuming commits won't be directly into Apache's repo) and
> then passing it off as a contribution to OSS. It just seems odd and
> sheisty. Am I wrong? I could be...
That's a good question, and I hope the mentors will correct me if I'm wrong,
but I believe as far as the ASF is concerned, the only thing that matters is
that there is no implication that the ASF paid for such work. The ASF also
cares that no money comes into the ASF directly to a project, but I think
that isn't a factor here.
I think it is ok (and I hope) that all of you will profit from the work
being done here. I am certainly being paid for my work here by Adobe, and
as far as the IRS is concerned, that shows up as net income (which is
effectively profit).
Regarding the work being done "in private", I think that's ok too. The
Adobe Flex SDK was developed outside of Apache, so was the Mavenizer and now
the GraniteDS stuff. Once it lands, there is plenty of time to comment,
change or even veto it before it gets released.
If you do some work for a customer and then decide that it is worth donating
to Apache Flex, it will have also been done off-list and that's ok too.
@Maxime, both Adobe and Tink have separately donated Spark Navigators. And
that is fine from an Apache perspective. Someday (soon I hope) we will
decide which one to put in a release, and that discussion will happen on the
mailin list. If you have an AutoComplete you wish do donate, please do so,
and the discussion whether to release yours or Jeffry's will be in the
community's hands and supposedly decided on technical merit.
@Jeffry, If someone hooked up the autocomplete logic to a proprietary
natural language processing library, that would probably be a problem, but I
doubt that will be the case. What I am concerned about, though, is that it
is based on your Flextras Autocomplete, so I think that means you/we have to
make sure the copyrights are handled correctly and proper paperwork is filed
for any code copyrighted to a legal entity other than you. Are the
copyrights in the existing code to Jeffry Houser or some other entity that
you control?
--
Alex Harui
Flex SDK Team
Adobe Systems, Inc.
http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui
