Since Jon has the most awareness of the eclipse plugin and is going to
be doing a release, both of which are very much acting in a legal
sense, I think we should add him to the PMC.
--- pmc info as it relates to openejb ---
We don't focus on the PMC in this project so many may not have a clear
concept of it. Every project at Apache has a PMC which at minimum
represents Apache from a legal perspective. The people on it are
expected to provide legal oversight, making sure that the legal entity
that is Apache has awareness enough to legally protect the code that
leaves it's doors, the users that use it, and the people who create
it. This means making sure any contributions going into the project
are clean and can be legally projected and making sure any binaries
going out meet the legal requirements so they as well can be legally
protected. It's a lot of watching all commits, keeping an eye on doc
contributions, ensuring CLAs are on file for anything of substantial
size, screening release binaries and source for headers, license
files, making sure any binaries being widely distributed have been
voted on, etc., etc. If you are on the PMC and you vote on a release
it means *you* have done all these things to the best of your
ability. If you have not, you either should not be on the PMC or
should not vote +1.
Being on the PMC is a service, not an achievement. Therefore if
someone is added to the PMC you should not say "congratulations", but
simply "thank you." It does not mean anything more than they have the
time to help us function legally. If someone is perpetually too busy
to provide legal oversight and steps down or goes emeritus, it does
not mean they are leaving, just that they are too busy for the extra
legal responsibility.
Some projects go beyond that and use the PMC as the decision makers
and leaders of the project. We do not. We make all our decisions
here. We don't even focus on who is a committer and who is not, which
I think is a major factor of our family-like community and general
"everyone is welcome and matters" spirit. If someone doesn't feel
like their input matters till they are a committer, or any other
status, we've done something wrong. Fortunately, this is one of our
strongest attributes and part of the magic that is this community.
That's the 10,000 foot view.
------------------------------------------
Back to the subject at hand. I don't think we have enough legal
oversight for the eclipse plugin. Jon is the obvious remedy for that.
Jon, any questions and do you think you have time to help provide the
extra oversight? I don't think anything goes into the eclipse plugin
that you haven't seen and you're now learning all the ins and outs of
a legally solid release, so you're more or less doing what is required
already. If you are, I'll put up a vote for adding you. If not, we
might want to hold the release; there's no rush.
-David
