On Thu, Oct 8, 2020 at 11:22 PM Matias N. wrote:
>
> > We need all of the above:
> >
> > 1. Integrate license clearing with ongoing work like we are already doing
> > for nxstyle, *AND*
>
> I've created the following issue to remind ourselves of this:
>
> https://github.com/apache/incubator-nuttx/issues/1954
>
>
> >
> > 2. Ongoing calls for non-coders to participate (license clearing,
> > documentation, artwork, marketing), *AND*
>
> Definitely.
>
> > 3. Seek funding and/or corporate support to pay for professional license
> > clearing
>
> Maybe the fourth point would be to distribute the load to committers? I
> think that in the end
> we should collectively realize of the importance of this task in order to
> guarantee this project
> stays afloat. If point (3) is to be pursued and you agree that (4) should
> be a fallback then (3)
> should have some kind of deadline, otherwise we will be waiting for too
> long until it is too late.
>
We should not wait. All must proceed simultaneously.
All points need to start simultaneously and continue forever or until all
files are cleared. We don't wait to do point 1 or 4. We don't stop doing
points 2 or 3.
I am okay with adding a modified point 4: At each release, there is a
blocker to clear 20 random files per committer. So every release, we will
clear approximately 300 files, with that number increasing as we add
committers. After 5 releases (while adding committers), we will clear ~1500
to ~2000 files. That doesn't sound impressive because we have ~90,000
files, but we also have point 1: every file touched gets cleared like
nxstyle. Approximately ~7500 files were modified since we joined the
Incubator (almost 1 year), so we will clear approximately ~8000 files per
year from point 1, + ~2000 files cleared from point 4 = ~10,000 files per
year.
Yes, that will take 9 years but it means that the project will always make
progress toward license clearing because it will be an ongoing activity, so
it will not be a blocker to graduation.
Also we do points 2 and 3 and we don't give up. We continually seek
volunteers and corporate support. If the 5 biggest companies that use NuttX
in their products would split the cost of a professional license clearing,
the entire 90,000 files will be cleared in a month. That's good for those
companies because (1) it helps ensure the longevity and health of this
project which they depend on, and (2) it frees up the engineers to improve
NuttX instead of clearing licenses.
We should reduce the number of files. We should announce that broken
boards, architectures, and drivers that have not received maintenance in a
long time and have no one working to fix/maintain them will be removed
after the next two releases, especially if they also have license problems.
Of course this is more work to identify the broken ones and publish a list,
to give ample advance notice before removing code. But this is a code job,
so it's not as boring for engineers and will have the added benefit of
making the codebase smaller and more maintainable.
Nathan
