On Jul 2, 2009, at 12:52 AM, David Blevins 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.
That's a pretty good description of a PMC. PMC's can be pulled from a
large percentage of the committer population or a relatively small
one. This is a project decision. As long as appropriate oversight is
being given, either approach is fine...
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.
Hmm. I'm not personally aware of any projects that operate in this
way. I have seen emails from time to time (e.g. "I'm on the PMC, so
we'll do what I say"). Those types of comments are usually dealt with
by the community... In fact, PMC's are prohibited from making
technical decisions on private@ mailing lists (or any other non-public
means of communication). A PMC may be the final arbiter of decision
making for a project (in the strictest Apache legal sense). However,
if the general community of a project is not able to have a
significant voice in the decision making for the project, then there
are problems with that project -- and the underlying issues need to be
addressed...
--kevan
