On 10/29/13, 4:20 PM, Eric Whyne wrote:
Some thoughts to re-ignite this thread:
The raccumulo project has some of it's code written in the language R, but
does not borrow any code from the R codebase and as such is not a
derivative work.
Unless anybody can think of a way in which R's own licensing could become a
concern, potential license conflicts might be a dead issue?
Looking around at this some more, I can't find any similar case on
LEGAL. Given that there is only a GPL implementation of R (take openjdk,
sun/oracle jdk, IBM's java, etc as an example for Java projects), I
wasn't sure if this would present any sort of issue because raccumulo
would be more or less useless if someone did not want to use GPL software.
<not-a-lawyer>Nothing is jumping out at me from a licensing standpoint
that would create concern to this code being hosted on ASF resources.
</not-a-lawyer>
The primary developer Phil Grim has signed an ICLA that I'm going to send
off tomorrow pending our company's contracts department's approval. Same
with company level CCLA, complete and pending final review. Phil, Aaron,
and Myself as listed as representatives on it.
Insofar as observations about lack of committership:
Phil has been willing to share his code for a while and wants to keep
contributing.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SQOOP-767
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ACCUMULO-141
discussion about this topic here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg10665.html
The other developer, Aaron is listed as a previous contributor to accumulo:
http://accumulo.apache.org/people.html
More about what's going on at the company:
https://twitter.com/DataTactics
More about DARPA XData (one of the programs of interest):
http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/XDATA.aspx
The customer project includes a charter to contribute to open source:
"XDATA plans to release open-source software toolkits to enable
collaboration among the applied mathematics, computer science and data
visualization communities."
As a company we'd be happy to just keep hosting the code on our Github
page, but I think we'd rather see it be included closer to the accumulo
project as mentioned previously. Given the momentum of R, the interest of
DARPA and others, I think the benefits outweigh he risks. There's an
extremely small chance of an orphaned project and even then as a 200+
person company there's somebody you can blame if it does become a problem.
We have a twitter account and github page people can go to with help
requests or fixes.
(treating "you" as all of those who might be involved in raccumulo whom
you mentioned, Eric)
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing raccumulo as a sub-project of
Accumulo. If those who are going to maintain it want to step up and do
things "The Apache Way", I would be happy to help you all along the path
so that you can grow to maintain it yourself. This would give us a
fairly low-risk, middle ground which we could try to grow a community
outside of your company that is involved with raccumulo.
The other Apache alternative would be for raccumulo to enter incubation
itself. I'm not sure if the current state of the project would merit the
effort of those involved at the moment. Regardless, this is also an option.
And, as always, there is the Github (or other external hosting) option.
I'm sure we'd also be happy to make sure there's mention on accumulo.a.o
to point people to any other location.
Thoughts everyone else?
