A couple of brief general comments:
- Apache's mission is to provide software for the public good, under the
Apache license or a fundamentally compatible one. Hence, we do not
distribute GPL code, for one example (see Category X licenses).
- Apache projects typically must use Apache managed hardware for hosting
websites and other important services. This allows us to be
self-sufficient in the case of outages, and ensure that we can control
our own fate.
- There are plenty of technical solutions for creating registries (i.e.
metadata about and pointers to, but not necessarily hosting the source)
of bits of software - both the httpd module stuff, various other obvious
projects, and even our own Maven and Archiva projects.
- It's clear that there are such a wide variety of services and bits of
software hosted at URLs related to openoffice.org that we have quite a
significant task ahead to maintaining as much of the existing services
to the millions of end users, while also respecting Apache policies.
- We have friends who work on the Google infrastructure behind
apache-extras.org (and infra@ can put you in touch with people once
there's some specific proposals, I hope)
I'm sure we can figure ways to have us host the metadata and any
appropriately licensed software, and have appropriate owners host any
software that falls under other kinds of licenses. But it's not going
to be easy...
And we shouldn't let it distract us too much from getting the actual
product source code checked in and building, either!
- Shane, dropping off to zleep... zzzzzzzz
