Roy T. Fielding wrote:
On Aug 3, 2008, at 9:19 AM, Stefano Bagnara wrote:
I'm a PMC member of the Apache JAMES project.
We received a contribution from an user including an installer for our
main product (Apache JAMES Server). The installer is for the Windows
platform and is created using a commercial product named SetupBuilder.
I pointed the user that we couldn't use it in JAMES product because #1
SetupBuilder was commercial and #2 it required our release manager to
run on windows in order to create the instealler.
He pointed me that APache HTTPD has a windows installer based on a
commercial product too (Installshield).
Can you kindly give more details on how you dealt with this?
Apache projects only release source. The binary installer is just one of
many post-release, binary builds that are created by trusted individuals
and delivered by us in order to make our non-programming users happy.
The ASF does not vote on them (release them), and we don't need them
to be entirely based on open source because the contents are not source.
They just have to be redistributable as binaries under our license.
Precisely.
I'll add though, that if you can do it "from scratch", the obvious way in
this day and age is to start with the WIX project (sourceforge, MS created)
which is an XML format - very transparent, and can be built by any of the
contributors using free tools.
That's actually my roadmap for apr (httpd etc). The nice bit of WIX, you
can build using whatever-tool, and then export the .msi into WIX's format
as a starting point. That's your project's call, obviously. What ASF had
released is Source Code, as Roy points out, everything else is commentary.
Bill
