The thing is Alex, all of this effort to dot our i's and cross our t's on the legal issues really is only for the benefit of major corporations who want to incorporate our work into some corporate-branded application. Actual end users of our software do not benefit one iota from the type of nitpicking we do on general@incubator, nor does the org's reputation for clean IP hinge on these considerations.
My attitude is to let the elephants in our projects provide their own feedback directly to the projects on the legal nitpicks that cause them pain- we do not need to police these minor issues on their behalf in a generic way. >________________________________ > From: Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> >To: "general@incubator.apache.org" <general@incubator.apache.org>; Joe >Schaefer <joe_schae...@yahoo.com> >Sent: Monday, January 14, 2013 12:15 PM >Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Expressing priorities about release reviews > > > > >On 1/14/13 7:01 AM, "Chen, Pei" <pei.c...@childrens.harvard.edu> wrote: > >>> Really is it so bad to say to a project with a bug in their license and >>> notice info: >>> fix this in trunk and show me the revision and I'll go ahead and approve >>> your >>> release as-is. >>> Running through iterations of this is very labor-intensive for the project, >>> and >>> anything we can do to cut down on the pain involved in cutting incubator >>> releases is IMO worthwhile. >> >> + 1 for this! >> Perhaps it would be nice for the podling to just come up with a list of all >> of >> the 3rd party libraries in a Jira and have a group (possibly from legal) >> that >> reviews them and helps them officially construct the LICENSE/NOTICE files the >> first time around (There are usually a lot of grey areas and not an easy >> straight reference to an outdated list of approved compatible licenses). >> Most >> of the committers are developers and not lawyers- so it would be nice to have >> developers do what they do best and focus on building awesome code. >I don't agree. As a member of a recently graduated podling, it was >impressed on me that the point of incubation was to not only figure out the >Apache Way of meritocracy and voting, but also to get the legal aspects >right. IMO, Apache is not GitHub: it is a corporation with bylaws and is a >legal entity, so we have to get the legal stuff right and it is our >responsibility as developers to learn enough about the legal stuff to get it >right. If there is a grey area, err on the side of caution or ask Apache >Legal. Yes, it is painful and slows you down, but usually, the same laws >also protect you. > >-- >Alex Harui >Flex SDK Team >Adobe Systems, Inc. >http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui > > > >
