On 1/18/06, Patrick Lightbody <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sure, that is the standard open source way. It usually works great. > > I'm just confused. I thought that everything had to be blessed, endorsed, and > signed off > by the gods/lawyers/infrastructure folks of Apache. If most of the people > working on > Struts Action prefer Confluence and JIRA, is there anything stopping us from > asking > Contegix to set them up?
The ASF board wants us to keep "essential services" on ASF hardware, so that the ASF assets on on ASF property. (It's a foundation thing.) Right now, "essential services" are defined as the repository, core mailing lists, and main website. We also want everything in the repository (including the website) to be under the ASF copyright. Projects have maintained issue trackers at other locations before. That's how we got JIRA in the first place. Projects were voting with their feet, and eventually someone volunteered to setup our own JIRA instance for all the projects to use. The trick is that the someone who volunteers has to have earned sufficient merit with the infrastructure team to be a credible volunteer. If we do maintain a resource elsewhere, we are doing so in our individual capacity, not as agents of the ASF. You'll note on the external wiki site that we proclaim: "This is an unofficial wiki site for projects hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. This site is not affiliated with the ASF. " Unlike the content we check into the repository (including the website), the external material is not automatically donated to the ASF, and so it is not property that the ASF would try to protect in the event of IP litigation. If we do setup external resources like this, it's polite to make them available to the other ASF projects as well. Then, it's not about us going our own way, it's about us staging a revolution so that Darwin can decide. At the ASF, the abiding principle is that "them that do the work make the decisions". When infrastructure decisions are made, often they are not made deliberately. They are made by someone on the infrastructure team deciding that Moin-Moin would be easy to setup and maintain, and then doing the work. AFAIK, the ASF Members never voted on Moin-Moin. Someone just did it. > How about taking that further? What is stopping me from making a new forum > (and > mailing list) just for Action 2.0? Obviously I wouldn't do that, but since > I'm new here I'd > rather bring things up with the team than quickly fork off in to my own > little world and, as > you pointed out, potentially be missing important information. The same thing that stopped JGuru: Nothing. * http://jguru.com/forums/Struts But, old-school ASF committers are not going to make project decisions on non-project resources. We *want* all of our decisions to be made on the list, and archived in the ASF mailbox, so that they become a true part of the project. When we (the PMC) do this, we are working as agents of the ASF, and our decisions become the ASF's decisions, and so we can be held harmless as individuals. Decisions we make offsite, we make as individuals, and are not protected. There's an old Apache rule-of-thumb that before we invite someone to join us as a committer, we wait until they have made sustained and significant contribution to the project for at least six consecutive months. There's a couple of reasons for that, one of them is to be sure that someone has hung around long enough to "get" what we are doing. There is a method to our madness, but sometimes it can take a few months to sink in. -Ted. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
