On Thu, 12 May 2011, Benson Margulies wrote:
No discussion at the ASF is complete until we have had it twice.
Or maybe three times, looks like our emails were sent at the same time, doh!
1) Some of us observe that many people are posting questions about Apache projects on stackoverflow.com. Some of them are getting good answers, some less so. Some TLPs have taken note of this and made some effort to provide support there. Some haven't.
And some TLPs are enjoying the good answers being supplied by people not in their existing community :)
3) Host our own variation on the theme, presumably using OSQA (an open source clone/tribute band) of SEI.
Not sure infra would go for this, and there's the issue of missing out on the existing community of people answering questions on our projects for us
4) Talk to the SEI management about their choice of license.
We'd probably be asking them to dual license code (but probably not text) in answers to our tags. Not sure how they'd take that, but it presumably isn't too big a deal. In the mean time, some people recommend just asking people posting code that they want to push upstream to agree to re-license.
5) Propose an ASF site for SEI at their area51 site.
Again we miss out on the existing community of people answering questions for us. For me, the big value to SO is that existing community of smart people answering questions. Personally I find the SO interface better for some question types, and a mailing list better for others, it's the community that interests me!
Nick
