On 10/11/2011 5:58 PM, floris v wrote:
Op 11-10-2011 23:46, Dennis E. Hamilton schreef:
*H.* Should the ASF or the Apache OpenOffice.org project decide to
terminate its support of the forums, it will grant a period of at
least 90 days for the transfer of the contents and structure of the
forums to another host as decided by the Administrators, Moderators
and Volunteers.
The PPMC is not empowered to agree to a clause that reads, "The ASF will
grant 90 days to someone". Only the board and officers can make
commitments on behalf of the org.
That's just the legal side of things and is not the same as the question
of whether one should expect the ASF, should any of its entities decide
to take the forums down, provide advance warning or migration codepath.
The relevant entities in this case include IPMC, Infra, and Board.
How exactly should I understand this? Is this meant to be discouraging,
like: forum people, you might as well leave right now?
Er, no, it shouldn't be discouraging. It's just stating the fact that
the PPMC here doesn't physically own the servers we'd be hosting on -
they belong to the ASF. Remember that the ASF's purpose is to provide
software for the public good, so I can't see why the ASF would ever just
"turn off the server" unless it was for an security breach.
----
Given the greater - or lesser - degree of trust in this matter, I really
don't know how to make people feel better about this than to show an
example. Bear with me for a moment as we learn about the Apache Attic -
the place Apache projects go when they're no longer active.
Apache projects rely on healthy, diverse communities to function. As
technology changes, older projects sometimes lose community energy.
Take Apache Xalan as a current example. Back in 1999 when I started
when Xalan was started as a project at the ASF, XML and XSLT were The
Next Big Thing, and were the huge buzzwords of the day. The project
flourished, and provided a great product that ended up within 2 years at
having over 80% marketshare (by a rough calculation). Things were great.
Fast forward 10 years later to 2009. The XML/XSLT processing stack is
old news; the core features haven't changed in ages, and even minor bug
fixes are rare, given that the software is so mature. Vendors that had
originally put employees to work on Xalan had focused elsewhere, and the
community was quiet.
Come up to 2010. The Xalan project still answers the occasional
questions, but it's reports to the board get monotonous. Nothing's
really happening - nothing bad is happening, but nothing much good
either. The board starts to ask what's up, but some remaining PMC
members say that they still hope to do more work on the project.
Come to 2011. The project fails to report sometimes, and fails to give
a real response to the board when they are asked if they still have a
healthy, viable community. A resolution to move Xalan to the attic is
put on the board agenda, but is tabled a number of times because
directors want to make absolutely sure that the whole of the Xalan
community has had a chance to show sufficiently diverse activity to
continue.
Wait! They have a new committer and PMC member, with a new plan!
Great, the board says: see what you can do with some new energy, and
report on your progress next quarter. The board passed a resolution
"rebooting" the Xalan PMC to give them a new chance.
Even if Xalan hadn't found a sufficient community to continue working,
the code still wouldn't have been gone. Projects that show no healthy
activity are given plenty of chance, and then are carefully "boxed up"
and put into the Apache Attic, where all resources are carefully
preserved in a read-only state, available for anyone to fork or take as
they please (under the Apache license).
So I really don't see *any* need to fear that Apache will turn off the
servers.
- Shane
