As a NetBeans community contributor and plugin maker, I'll try to clarify some points about how plugins work on NetBeans and how they're important.
1. Plugins can either upload a binary (NBM) or just an advertisement (with link to another site) 2. Plugins that upload a binary (NBM) can be downloaded by anyone using a Download button on the website. 3. Plugins can be Verified by the NetBeans team members, so they appear on Update Center from NetBeans IDE. 3.1. In order to a plugin get verified, it needs to be signed and have a license. 3.2. After each major NetBeans release, the plugin needs to be verified again. As you can see, there are more than one method for distributing a plugin, the easiest one is to upload a binary to plugin portal and directly distribute to anyone, without need signing or add license file, it's just a binary repository. The owner remains the plugin maker and a default license is assigned (I think). AFAIK, there are more than 1000+ NetBeans plugins available, some of them are very old, but they may work in recent versions of NetBeans (without verification). The thing is, the process of making a plugin or anything else available on maven central could be tough and complex for many developers and asking for everyone changing the plugin license is much worse. I see the current approach of NetBeans plugins portal with good eyes, but it could be improved of course, allowing Maven Artifacts for example (need to check how verification will work in this case). Anyway, it appears that plugins.netbeans.org is just a CMS and part of netbeans.org portal, so I don't see how to move to ASF infrastructure without bring the plugins part. Although, I think the discussion is about the binaries and not the plugins portal itself, binaries could be hosted anywhere with help of a third party company. BTW I'm a outsider (non Oracle), so I don't know nothing about infrastructure perspective. Regards, Leonardo Zanivan On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 5:02 AM Bertrand Delacretaz <bdelacre...@apache.org> wrote: > On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 4:22 PM, David Nalley <da...@gnsa.us> wrote: > >>> ...SIR03 Migration of plugin publication system, plugins.netbeans.org, > to Apache infrastructure > > > > This looks to be an interesting. Are the plugins gated by license? Any > > vetting going on? Is there a history of DMCA requests being served by > > things uploaded to plugins.nb.o? How much bandwidth does this site > > consume? Are their folks who can maintain this site from bare metal up > > in the project?... > > The plugins.netbeans.org site says "plugins provided by community > members and third-party companies" so I doubt Oracle has the rights to > donate all that code to us. Sorry that we missed that during the > proposal preparation phase. > > If that's correct I would suggest keeping the plugins.netbeans.org > migration out of the incubation proposal, and letting Apache NetBeans > handle that later. That might just be suggesting to move that code to > GitHub and creating an alternate plugin installation mechanism that > grabs whatever it needs there. > > It looks like those plugins are clearly "code associated with an > Apache project" once NetBeans migrates to the ASF, but code that > probably shouldn't belong to the ASF. > > Owners of specific plugins will still be able to donate them as well, > separately, once Apache NetBeans is established, via our IP clearance > mechanism, http://incubator.apache.org/ip-clearance/ > > -Bertrand > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org > >
