Here is my opinion on the whole release issue, which has not changed in 18 months since the first big discussion of releases and incubation branding.
Full Disclosure: While this is my opinion as a member of the Incubator PMC, it is not necessarily the consensus of the PMC. In addition, I was once a BEA employee and am still a (recently inactive) committer on the beehive project; however, I have been consistent in my views on this issue regardless of what individual/company/project has raised the issue. Given (my assumptions): 1. (binary) releases are useful in building interest in a project, which often leads to a stronger community; also, the process of doing a release is useful for a project to go through while in incubation. 2. while in incubation (when a project is still trying to reach its goals for a diverse, collaborative, meritocratic-based community), Apache does not want a project to claim that it is a fully-endorsed Apache project 3. incubation status is no reflection on the technical quality or maturity of the code base Therefore: 1. releases should be allowed and even encouraged while incubation (personally, I don't care whether they're called "releases", "Releases", or "official project release". 2. projects should a) include obvious notices regarding their incubation status and the status of their releases (e.g. in the README file, as part of the file name, and on their web site), b) hold a vote of their ppmc (which should include interested members of the Incubator PMC), and c) should ensure their mentor approves of the release and its process. 3. projects within incubation should not be given some arbitrary technical boundary, such as preventing them from classifying a release as "1.0" or "2.0", based on the history and stability of the code base. Guess what? When we (this list) spend literally hundreds of emails discussing these issues in late 2003, we came up with a lose set of guidelines that pretty much fit with what is described above. See http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Incubation_Policy.html#Releases%0D. Note there is nothing in there that states a release can't be called "official" or "1.0" or anything like that. Howeverm, it must meet the branding guidelines. I suggest those who disagree with these written guidelines suggest changes to them to be discussed and voted upon; otherwise, existing projects today should follow the only documentation we have given them. (ready for the inevitable flames to begin, possibly from some folks I have a lot of respect for...) Cliff --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
