On Sat, 2004-08-07 at 05:20, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote: > Ashish Srivastava wrote: > > Hi, > > > > We are a product based company named Daffodil Software Ltd, based in > > India. We have developed many good products using JAVA out of which our > > two premium product Daffodil DB (an RDBMS) and Daffodil Replicator > > (database utility software) is largely accepted by world software > > community. > > > > We are planning to make our Daffodil Replicator an open source project. > > > > How can we make it with www.apache.org please let us know how we have to > > proceed. > > > > I visited at http://incubator.apache.org but unable to find the answer > > how to proceed in order to make our product open source. > > I'm cross-posting to lists where there might be interest in helping you > out on this. > > > www.daffodildb.com
Hi Ashish, The following is just my personal opinion, as a member of the ASF (Apache Software Foundation); I am not speaking on behalf of the ASF. I think it is great that you are considering releasing some of your code under an open-source licence. I am sure there are a number of people that are willing to offer advice on the process of releasing your code as open-source. And if you do this, you are certainly welcome to reuse the Apache Public License legal document as the base for the license terms you release your code under; the ASF and its legal advisors deliberately designed the license in a way that makes it easy for non-ASF-hosted projects to use. However if you are suggesting that the code you release may be hosted and maintained by the Apache Software Foundation, I personally think this is unlikely to happen. Firstly, the code you are considering releasing under an open-source licence is an add-on to a proprietory product. The ASF is unlikely to consider adopting that kind of project. This doesn't mean that making the code open-source is a bad idea, it's just something that the ASF usually avoids being involved with. Secondly when the ASF adopts existing code, the provider of the code is expected to show evidence that there is a group of developers willing to continue maintenance and development of the code in the future. Apache doesn't want to end up hosting lots of code with no associated developers. Given that the code you are considering releasing can only be used with a proprietory database which does not have a large market share, I think this will be a difficult thing for the Daffodil Replicator project to demonstrate. If your replicator tool can actually replicate data for multiple different brands of database then please let us know; that would make the project much more interesting, and therefore more likely to obtain an adequate pool of developers. In particular, if it could be used with the IBM "CloudScape" product which has recently been offered by IBM and accepted by the ASF (and to be renamed "Derby" I believe), there could be significant interest. The result could well be an improved replicator for both Derby and Daffodil - but only if the architecture of your current code is not too tightly bound to the Daffodil database. If you are interested in discussing this further, then please describe what Daffodil Software expects to gain by outsourcing this software. There are a number of different open-source licences available, and which one is appropriate depends upon the business strategy of Daffodil. The ASF always uses the apache license, which is a "BSD-like" license, but there are many successful open-source projects that use a different approach. You may wish to investigate MySQL and JBoss as alternative business models. As I am sure you are aware, the ASF is not the only way to make code open-source. You can always host the source code and associated development framework (newsgroups, email lists, etc) on your own site, or use the SourceForge site. If you let us know a little more about the business goals of Daffodil Software we may be able to offer better advice. Disclaimer: No responsibility is taken for any consequences of you or your company acting on any statements made in this email. Regards, Simon PS: Sorry for the wide cross-posting. Nicola's reply suggested this topic may be of interest to all these groups.. PPS: Nicola, I hope Ashish is actually subscribed to one of the lists receiving this email. If this is not the case, could you please forward this email. Thanks. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
