Hi Chris/Jorn, Thank you for your excellent mentorship and enthusiasm about the project -- it is bound to only strengthen cTAKES.
I'd like to provide some further clarification. The 50 contributors could be someone who contributed one way or another to the project- but not necessarily performing the code commits to SVN. For example, they may contribute their help with a project in the development of training a model or documentation. What would you advise here? cTAKES migration to Apache is very exciting and has been happening faster than I expected. I think it would actually be okay if we postpone the current release for a month (and just have the release in ASF rather than SF)- to give us some time to migrate all of the code from the SF repo to the ASF repo, test the integration, update any links/references, and to give a chance for any existing users to be aware of where to expect to download the new code. The current documentation could actually be found across SF, nci wiki, mayo, etc. and hence would benefit greatly from bringing everyone together onto the ASF infrastructure. We are fully committed to the Apache move. What we proposed as our last SF release was prompted by our interpretation of these statements from the ASF policy: " It may take some time to track down all contributors. It is not necessary to have paperwork on file for all contributions before the code is imported. It may be necessary to reverse some patches and rewrite areas of code if contributors cannot be found or at not happy about given Apache written permission to use their code. No releases are possible until the provenance of all the code to be release has been clearly established and the relevant paperwork filed with Apache. It is therefore important to keep the status updated. " Please bear in mind, some of the IP clearance items are still in progress. (Boston's Children's just gave us the verbal software grant and agreements, Mayo signed theirs.) Just wanted to triple check that ASF would be okay to take an exact snapshot of the current code base and create a release with existing package structure and copyrights, etc. We are pushing as hard as we can to get all IP clearance. We will very much appreciate your advice. Also worth noting in case it was not properly expanded on in our proposal is that cTAKES is made up of a collection UIMA components which could be developed independently. (Mayo and Children's worked on some of the core components, other projects/components can in theory migrate/contribute their code as they feel comfortable and hence building the community.)" -----Original Message----- From: Mattmann, Chris A (388J) [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, July 23, 2012 12:00 PM To: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: SVN source structure for Apache cTAKES? Hi Pei, On Jul 23, 2012, at 8:49 AM, Chen, Pei wrote: > There is a 'Software Development Group' as part of the SHARPn project (main > contributors to cTAKES code.) with representation from each site who meet > regularly and Apache was discussed and announced so no fork in the cTAKES > project (everyone should be on board to migrate over). How can you say in one statement that there are over 50 developers that contribute to cTAKES, and that a handful of you "represent" those 50 developers? At least that's the way I'm reading your statement. Also Apache isn't a hierarchy where sites from an external entity like SHARPn have "representatives" that participate in the Apache version of the project. We are all individuals at Apache, and we participate here as individuals. > From what I recall, I think there about ~8-12 active committers on SF (even > less prior to 6 months ago.)... OK, so why say 50 then? Cheers, Chris > > -----Original Message----- > From: Jörn Kottmann [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, July 23, 2012 11:41 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: SVN source structure for Apache cTAKES? > > On 07/23/2012 05:18 PM, Chen, Pei wrote: >> My apologies as we tried to be transparent as we can in the original project >> proposal: >> - There are currently over 50 contributors/developers actively contributing >> to cTAKES spread across over 8 sites (Mayo, BCH, Colorado University, >> Pittsburgh, UCSD, MITRE, etc.). >> - We have already communicated to developers as well as known users about >> the move to Apache as soon as we could. They have also been invited to the >> various ctakes-dev@ mailing lists as soon as they were created (which seems >> to be a first logical step in also becoming contributors/committers). > > I am a bit scared by this statement. The initial developers list only has 4 > names on it compared to 50 active contributors/developers, why is there such > a huge gap? How many people have commit rights for cTAKES on SF? > > Did you reach consensus among the developers to move cTAKES to the Apache > Incubator or is this a fork of the cTAKES project? > > This also has a big impact on the IP clearance process because all parties > who contributed a significant amount to the code base should be involved in > it. > > Jörn > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. Senior Computer Scientist NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246 Email: [email protected] WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
