I think you'll find that there is far less micro-managing and contributor-impeding process on Apache. Organization structure is very "flat." Recognition of contributions and invitations to becoming a committer will probably happen regularly, especially after the Oracle contribution is in hand and there is code, web content, documentation, and issue lists to work with. There are immense opportunities for contributions.
One place where Apache is pretty strict has to do with toolcraft and the tools that must be used (e.g., the CMS for web sites and Subversion for practically everything). These tools are used across Apache for non-technical as well as technical reasons. They fit into the visibility of everything that happens (the Subversion commit messages include diffs) and the reversibility of anything that is found to be undesirable or incorrect. The other area where Apache is rigorous has to do with IP and ensuring that Apache-provided code is clean and under the Apache license. There are also trademark and legal requirements that will come up once the OpenOffice.org trademark is transferred to Apache as expected. We don't know how that will work at this point. Also, everything is recorded and visible on the public lists. No IRC decisions are made. It all happens in public. The only private activities have to do with human-resource (personally-private) matters, non-disclosed security issues, and anything where privacy is required for legal reasons. I think the first hurdle for existing OpenOffice and LibreOffice contributors is the iCLA. This bothers some people but Apache is unyielding about this requirement for committers. It, along with clearly tracing the contributions to code, is part of assurance that Apache-licensed content is IP-clean. The second hurdle happens with regard to toolcraft. As a mostly non-developer Windows-lover, that is the biggest learning curve for me. It has inspired me to resume writing code on some private projects, though. And I wanted to become more proficient with *nix-based systems anyhow. Just not so quickly [;<). Welcome back from Mallorca! - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Pavel Janík [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2011 10:32 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: PPMC Membership and Responsibilities Hi, On Jul 16, 2011, at 7:15 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote: > The Initial Committers are listed on this page: > <http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal?action=recall&rev=207>. > The list was closed on 2011-06-10 when voting on the incubator proposal > commenced. then I missed it enjoying flowering magnolias at Mallorca :-) I'll work on AOOo despite this fact as I did on OOo in the past. Thanks for details. -- Pavel Janík
