I've been pondering if our critieria for granting committership is out of date.
It used to be, in Jakarta, that a committer was the basic element of our culture. We didn't have members and we didn't particularly have a PMC. Becoming a committer meant that you were a part of the fabric, you voted, you released projects - whatever. We were also very worried about things going incorrectly into the version control system as it was seen as distribution. Things are a bit different now. To match the general ASF, voting is only binding from members of the PMC - committers have as much of a vote as users - ie) it's hopefully listened to but it's not binding. Cliff, as ASF Legal VP, is far more concerned with things we actively distribute than with the passive distribution of the version control system. If something is messed up, we just have to fix it asap. Plus the measure of what is messed up is lessened - we can have GPL jars in our SVN and it wouldn't cause us legal grief until we packaged them up in a distribution. So, for people like Chris who are actively trying to get involved, are we setting a bar that just causes us pain? I don't think there are any social or legal issues that say we have to wait on people to submit a bunch of patches, and who cares if we end up with yet more inactive committers, each active committer will be worth 9 inactive ones. Just thinking...and thus stirring the pot a bit because I can't help but share... Hen --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
