Hi friends,
(Relax, I'm not going doomsday or anything.)
I started this project in the late 90s. I still lead it now in 2011. I've done
over 80% of all commits. The site, the mailing lists and stuff are hosted by
my company (Haxx).
Lots of me and my company there. Is this possibly a burden for the project?
To reduce the risk that this project appears as too Daniel-centric or that it
seems to be owned or somehow single-handedly controlled by Haxx, I was
considering to apply for curl to become a member of The Software Freedom
Conservancy (http://sfconservancy.org/). It would be a way to make it more
independent of me and show that we in Haxx are not looking to "own" this more
than we all own it - even though I hope to keep maintaining the project for a
long time ahead still.
To quote their web site:
The Software Freedom Conservancy is a not-for-profit organization that helps
promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
(FLOSS) projects. Conservancy provides a non-profit home and infrastructure
for FLOSS projects. This allows FLOSS developers to focus on what they do
best — writing and improving FLOSS for the general public — while
Conservancy takes care of the projects' needs that do not relate directly
to software development and documentation.
But...
In the end I decided it isn't really time for us to apply to join this
organization. The primary reasons I think it's not worth it, are:
A - I think our project runs really well already. We have lots of fine
infrastructure working and we have a healthy stream of new contributors,
good patches, mailing list discussions and regulars keeping along.
B - The Software Freedom Conservancy is a US organization and I know there
have been concerns expressed in the past about putting (too much) project
materials and "weight" in the US and what risks and downsides that might
carry on for us who aren't in the US. So all that tax-excempt and stuff
are only for US companies and they basically can only provide good
services within the US. Our project has a very large share of contributors
and existance outside of the US.
C - We don't have a particular need for that much of what they offer.
o I don't want to achange our copyright scheme - no copyright assignments
and no consolidation in any kind. Everyone owns what they do and we use
the software license to tell what we allow others to do with our code.
o Our license is just so liberal that we won't fight any court battles
against license violators.
o We don't really handle any money - and I don't see us doing that in the
future either. When companies want to pay for support, features, help or
whatever those are deals between buyers and sellers and the curl project
itself is not involved. Services and hosting and development are donated
to us.
So, I think we can just keep things as they are and move along. This said, I
want to stress that I am *always* open for criticism, ideas and feedback on
what we can do to improve, to change, to fix or whatever in order to run this
project smoother.
--
/ daniel.haxx.se
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