Hi all, Since transferring code to Apache means that the code automatically becomes Apache licensed, it is of extreme importance that we don't inadvertently donate code that we don't want to donate.
E.g., simply donating 'hg.netbeans.org' is going to be problematic, since there's for example the 'nb-javac', i.e., javac fork in there, which indeed can be excluded, though there are other pieces in hg.netbeans.org, such as hg.netbeans.org/apitest, which we also don't want to donate since that's also a fork of something GPL-licensed from the JDK. Moreover, hg.netbean.org/contrib contains modules that are also potentially contentious. Hence, there is quite some work going on at the moment to identify which parts we actually do want to donate. We don't want to find out afterwards that we have donated code that belongs to the JDK which, of course, we can then remove from the Apache repo, although we'd still have the history of that erroneous commit in there, which we do not want to have happen. Potentially, we need to go through every package going out and specifically delineate what we are donating, if there's pieces in there that we're not donating. Maybe one approach could be to limit the wording of the code grant for the hg.netbeans.org repositories to source code written in the Java programming language to just those source code files within the "org.netbeans" namespace, i.e. in the "org.netbeans" package hierarchy. Then, while the transfer of that subset of code is taking place, which would be the majority of the code we'd want anyway, we could look at the other code on a case by case basis for inclusion in the donation. Anyway, just sketching out the situation right now -- and again I had assumed, falsely, that all these considerations would only be applicable at the end of incubation, not right at the start. All this is the case since, again, anything we put into an Apache repo is then at that stage Apache code. Thanks, Gj
