Without question, Harmony knows how to manage its legal bits. Can the community navigate through all those hurdles and processes and other shtuff to actually produce a release? Is this community set up to produce releases, or is it set up to check off legal paperwork?
I know there are many individuals participating in Harmony who have done *dozens* of releases of various products here at Apache. But can they get the community to produce a (developer) release of Harmony? For example, I think about all the hell the Tomcat community went through with the whole v3 versus v4 versus v5 debates. Or Geronimo trying to figure out what v1.2 meant. Or Avalon trying to get a release out. Or httpd finding it On 10/19/06, Leo Simons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Oct 17, 2006, at 4:30 PM, Daniel Kulp wrote: > I don't have a binding vote, but my thought is Harmony has the > same "issue" as Felix: namely they haven't done a release or provided > even a "test release" to the IPMC so the IPMC can be sure the podling > knows the proper way to do a release and understands and can > correct all > the issues such as proper apache licensing, etc... Basically, make > sure the podling can get all their "Apache Legal Ducks in a Row." This is a good point, and thanks for raising it. I'll now try and take away your concern, and everyone elses, on this point. As one of harmony's mentors, I'm confident that harmony has more legal ducks than most apache projects, and has them more precisely in row that most, and that this is only the case because of a community with outstanding "legal awareness". Harmony started with precisely 0 committers, and 6 months of legal talks. Its processes and policies are, IMHO, more "secure" and "safe" (paranoid!) than those of any other project at apache. They were like that before we seriously started adding committters. Each committer was added only after a vote on the PPMC. Each person on the PPMC was only added after a vote by the PPMC. Each big outside contribution was internally vetted and discussed on the development list extensively, and then explicitly voted in by the PPMC, with the PPMC demonstrating time and time again to be fully aware of all the legal gotcha's. I haven't bothered counting, but I'm confident that the harmony PPMC as well as its development community have done over 30 "important" votes on issues with potential legal implications (at harmony, almost anything besides a simple patch has potential legal implications, but accepting 500,000 lines of source code and merging it into the repository certainly does). Harmony even had an issue at some point (which I'm sure the incubator PMC can remember, since it was kept up-to-date on private@) where an external contribution we received (by an individual not associated with any of the "big companies" that have salaried people contributing to harmony) could possibly be a licensing infringement on an existing third party open source project, and managed to resolve that in what I would argue is very much the best way possible (not only resolving any potential licensing mess, but building what seem to be becoming healthy and permanent ties with the third party open source project). So harmony even has a legal duck in its row that most apache projects have never ever had to deal with. I'm expecting harmony will have to deal with more issues like this before (and after) it issues a 1.0 final release, and I'm also expecting harmony to be able to deal with it. > Looking at the latest snapshot downloaded from the website, there > definitely are some things missing. (mainly, stuff missing from the > META-INF of all the jars) LICENSE and NOTICE files should go into all files that one would consider distributing seperately. Harmony is not going to be distributed in pieces, with individual jars ending up at ibiblio, harmony is going to be distributed as a JDK (and as a HDK, but that's a detail). Just like, for example, the Sun JDK, the license file therefore doesn't end up inside the JDK-provided jars, but at the top level of the JDK distribution. > Anyway, I think Harmony should first go through the process of > preparing a > release and get it OK'd by the IPMC. There is a LOT a podling can > learn > while going through that process. Since Felix was "asked" to > create a > sample release, I would expect Harmony should do the same. This is normally true. As a mentor (being well aware of the "do a release before graduation" incubator guideline, even if undocumented), I made the assertion that the harmony community wouldn't learn anything significant from it. Since harmony also has other concerns when it comes to release management (like purposefully staying under the radar and not generating much press noise), its actually much healthier for harmony not to go through the release motions right now. When harmony later on, as a TLP, will have to do a proper release, rest assured that such an effort will be subject to a lot more scrutiny than is typical for apache projects, by virtue of having to pass a TCK, having to dance around known patents, etc. cheers, LSD --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
