A few comments and suggestions from a mentor.
On 8/1/2011 9:48 PM, Dave Fisher wrote:
<snip>
<sigh>
There are so many points and counterpoints about new/old and
easy/hard.
I think we need guidance about the migration. We need to state what
we want to do given the strong and understandable push to preserve
the Wiki, forums, and user downloads of the legacy code.
Personally, I'd suggest that a few of the committers who can actually do
the work here start taking chunks of it, making more concrete
[PROPOSAL]s, and start working with infra@ and this list on how to do
those specific tasks. Break some of the bits off into manageable chunks
and make progress on them.
A key point with meritocracies is that the people *doing* the work
(effectively) get to decide. It feels like a number of threads recently
are either discussing various details without having more concrete
proposals, or are being driven by non-committers who are discussing ways
that the project *won't* work.
This community - in general, everyone on ooo-dev@, but more specifically
the committers and PPMC - need to focus on specific ways that the
project *will* work.
WIth the goal of preserving the existing community knowledge base, we
need to know that it is OK for us to consider doing the following
with the openoffice.org domain site on Foundation hardware.
(1) Make sure that we are addressing any concerns about hosting the
user forums on an openoffice.org domain - hosted on an Apache Jail.
Simply hosting it mostly staticly: just figure out the IP issues of
hosting (what seems to be a significant amount of) content that is not
under the AL (Apache License).
The whole concept of this large amount of community-driven wiki content
(i.e. from people not likely to sign iCLAs) really deserves it's own
separate thread. In particular, figuring out how the community will
plan to manage new updates to the community wiki (i.e., either ensuring
that we have iCLAs or equivalent on all new contributions, or not).
Note: has anyone investigated other Apache wikis and how they manage
contributions from non-committers? There are plenty that do that already.
(2) Allow the MediaWiki to exist as much as possible under its
current terms for existing content, and under Apache terms for new
content - hosted on an Apache Jail.
A question for this list and for infra@ (in terms of what the Apache
infrastructure team is able and willing to physically host). The best
approach is to figure out more concretely what the ooo podling wants,
and then work with infra@ to get it.
(3) Host the old Oracle and Sun releases on download.openoffice.org
through the Apache Mirror system even though they are not AL 2.0.
Are these good questions to ask the Board in our report? Or should we
be looking for guidance on legal-discuss.
Heh, sorry, no, these are not questions to ask the board! These are
things for *this* project to figure out - first step 1) what you want to
do, and then step 2) how you can do it. Step 2) presumably requires
talking with legal-discuss@ and infrastructure@ to get specific advice.
If there are significant IP risks with what you're publishing on Apache
servers today, or if there are unresolvable conflicts within the PPMC,
then include things like that as "issues for the board".
The board is here to provide the oversight to ensure the Foundation as a
whole is running smoothly. The board has appointed a number of specific
officers or committees who can help with all of these questions - like
VP, Legal, the Infrastructure team, Branding, and even just the
Incubator PMC (and your mentors) that can provide guidance on who to ask
for help on different issues.
We would certainly be very sure that it would very difficult for
misunderstanding that these are NOT Apache releases.
Regards, Dave
Good questions though!
- Shane
