On Jan 4, 2007, at 4:43 PM, Chris Howe wrote:
For those of you interested, a project for a sandbox has been approved on sourceforge.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ofbiz-sandbox/). The goal is to provide an area that you can collaborate on ideas for implementations based on Apache Open for Business. These collaborations can be from simple feature improvements, to showcasing a particular change, to complete components, to a half-baked idea that you want to get the gist out to and let someone with some more skills or time help work on. Please understand that this is currently (and depending on Apache OFBiz's interest in this side project, perhaps permanently), completely outside of the Apache Ofbiz project and has no relation to the ASF other than simply being geeked about the current and future Apache Open for Business project. Code that gets added to the ofbiz-sandbox may never make it into the Apache OFBiz project. I have no control over such matters.
Thanks for clarifying this distinction. My experience with the ASF is still somewhat limited, but form what I know so far this sort of thing is for the most part discouraged at the ASF. There is an informal "project" that is like a sandbox for ASF committers only that is meant to be a pre-incubator type of thing to explore different things and facilitate collaboration in those.
Just because it's unofficial, there's certainly no problem with this from the OFBiz perspective, and we could probably even find a place for a link to on the OFBiz site or at least on Confluence. It is the intent of OFBiz that anyone can build whatever they want on top of it, and if you're interested in facilitating this, go for it!
There is no level of quality necessary to contribute. Just do your best not to wreck someone else's progress. I think the goal of anyone who would be contributing any time or code to the ofbiz-sandbox is doing so in the spirit of open source so that others can benefit from a solution they've discovered. Therefore to prevent any potential roadblocks in Apache Ofbiz adopting solutions formed in the sandbox, all contributed code will be under the Apache 2.0 license and I suppose donated to the ASF. If anyone knows what I need to do to ensure a roadblock isn't created, please let me know (collect iCLA's from potential committers, ensure Apache already has an iCLA for the potential committer ??) As soon as I get that question answered, I'll start adding people who want to be added to the svn commit access on the sf.net site.
Before the code touches the OFBiz code base it doesn't matter, you can do manage things however you want. I wouldn't worry about CLAs until code starts moving to OFBiz, and even then if it doesn't have to go through incubation CLAs won't be needed anyway.
Still, if there are large blocks of code developed by a bunch of different people the licensing issues get trickier and such things _may_ have to go through incubation to get into the OFBiz code base... When you have a bunch of fingers in a pot things do get trickier...
Personally, I would prefer to use these mailing lists for discussion of things in the sandbox (to encourage talk from more people), but if that is or becomes a hassle for the Apache OFBiz project, just say the word and I'll maintain a list or two off of the sf.net site.
I don't think this is the best of ideas... If it relates to the development of OFBiz itself, please use the ofbiz dev mailing list. If it relates to the use of OFBiz itself, please use the ofbiz user mailing list. If it relates to the development of something that is _not_ OFBiz and it isn't a question or discussion about how to use OFBiz, using separate mailing lists would be much better. Not doing so could (will...) be very confusing, especially to people who are not up to date on all of the happenings around here. Even now I'm not comfortable sometimes with the level of opentaps discussion on the ofbiz mailing lists, but I suppose that is a natural consequence of the way things are structured in that project (not that anything that is bad or whatever), and hopefully we'll be able to distinguish things more clearly from the OFBiz side in the future (and hopefully Si will continue the same thing on the opentaps/OSS side).
-David
