Simon Brouwer wrote on Jun 2, 2011 6:21:30 am:
I had already been so bold as to adding myself to the list, expressing my support to the proposal. I was wondering though. In the OpenOffice.org project, many community members contribute in other ways than committing code, for example by writing or translating documentation, being active in the marketing project, taking part in QA. Some concern has been expressed that, if the meritocratic system in Apache is based on code contribution only, those community members are not able to fully become part of the OpenOffice.org Apache project or the Apache community.
I see there are already several excellent responses to this, but I thought I'd just point out that I've watched two Apache projects recently vote primarily non-code contributors onto their PMCs in recent months. So I don't think this is an issue, especially if a solid community forms that is interested in the end-user aspects of what OpenOffice.org should be about.
All committers do need to sign the iCLA, which simply grants the ASF the appropriate rights to be able to license all our software under the Apache License. The ASF does not use copyright assignments, merely licensing under our license.
Committers can checkin code (or documentation, or translations, etc.) into whatever projects they have commit rights on - every Apache project (or podling, for those in the Incubator) has it's own separate committer list.
PMC members actually vote on formal releases, and thus determine how the project moves forward on the larger level. Likewise, podlings have a PPMC that helps to form the community and work towards graduation, as well as some existing Mentors from the pre-existing Apache community.
As an end-user project, incubating OpenOffice.org will be a somewhat different experience from most other Apache projects, which historically have happened to be server-side stuff. But this sounds exciting to me - I miss working on software that all sorts of people use, not just geeks and sysadmins.
- Shane (reading the archives, so apologies for mis-threading) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
