Hi Julies, Julius Davies wrote: > Hi, Martin, and Everyone, > > If someone is interested in taking over a truly inactive project, > maybe they should fork and start their own SVN repository from their > own domain. The person should make it clear that their fork is in no > way sanctioned by Apache.
That's a requirement, since it cannot be called the same as the Apache project name. > > The only responsibility Apache might have in this situation, if so > inclined, is to include a link from "[inactive-project].apache.org" to > the fork, with some warnings that Apache's higher standards with > respect to intellectual property are not in effect if you follow the > link. Don't agree here. Our current code base is our responsibility, even though there are no active developers. Better information on the project status could be useful however. > > If the fork proves popular, and the person wants to bring it back into > the family, the person could write an email to Jakarta-General asking > to be nominated, become a committer, and then merge the fork back in. They will have to come through the incubator to come back to us, because of legal issues. The problem most of the time that there isn't even someone asking to take over.. A fork may also not use our project name. So I prefer to get momentum back here :) > > I'm assuming that a reactivated project with only one committer is > still better than an inactive one with none I'm also assuming that > the majority of "inactive" projects are smaller ones which probably > only had one main committer / benevolent-dictator in the first place: > > http://blog.generationjava.com/roller/bayard/entry/enterprise_communities_episode_2 > > > <blockquote> > Commons is a very interesting case study here. Here's a pretty obvious > white elephant - nearly every Commons component is running under the > dictator model. You can point to any component and as long as it's > active, it's "So and so's" baby. > </blockquote> > > Martin, can you provide some example projects that are running into > this catch22? Is it quite a rare situation? Slide is the current case at hand, which is far from a small component (and has quite a complex code base from what I understood). Currently we have one committer there who is still learning his way into the code base (please correct me Antoine if this is a false statement). Cactus has a bit of the scenario you described btw (external code), but I prefer people working here, instead of forking, so people can see the project is alive and no legal stuff needs to be dealt with when returning the code. Another project is BCEL, which actually has got 2 forks. So it's not really a rare scenario and could surface any time when there aren't enough committers left to get new people aboard. Mvgr, Martin --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
