Short note - if anybody has questions concerning legality concerns, especially you Jon, feel free to drop me a note. I am responsible for preparing the GA releases of an IBM program product where I am especially focus on the open source aspects. The product has an Eclipse client and a middle-tier component and both are re-using plenty of Apache software.
Cheers Daniel On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:52 AM, David Blevins<[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > >
