Roy T. Fielding wrote:
If the name stays as Oscar, then it is obviously a move.
Certainly one way to look at. Another is reuse. :-)
My main concern was continuity for existing users if the source code is
seeded with Oscar code. There is no doubt about it, if I stop working on
Oscar, it will die. For example, earlier this morning I was just
renaming the packages so that Oscar is no longer a package name...does
this still constitute a move? It is hard to say.
My discussion with various Apache people led to my understanding that
there was interest in starting an Apache OSGi project. I agreed to
participate. Since I am Oscar, if I move to a new Apache OSGi project,
then so does it to a very large degree.
The website says
Other contributors
* Rob Walker from Ascert.
* Stephane Frenot from l'INSA de Lyon.
* Humberto Cervantes from Universidad Autonoma
Metropolitana-Iztapalapa.
* Didier Donsez from LSR-IMAG.
* Stephane Chomat from LSR-IMAG.
* Michel D'Hooge from Trialog.
and the changes file at
http://oscar.objectweb.org/changes.html
includes quite a few additional contributors. Are you saying that
none of those people contributed anything significant enough to be
separately copyrightable as a derivative or new work? Or are you
saying that you have a signed document from all significant
contributors that assigns copyright to you?
Most of the contributions are for bundles, which are not part of the
core. I am not granting bundles. Many of the people listed are
supporters more so than contributors.
If someone pointed out a bug fix or tracked it down a bug in the Oscar
source, I gave them credit. However, all bug fixes were implemented by
me and committed by me. I am the only person with commit rights to
Oscar's code.
There could possibly be one exception to this, which is the code for the
LDAP parser/evaluator which was originally written for me by my former
PhD advisor, Dennis Heimbigner, and has been in Oscar since the
beginning. I know that he has no issues with it.
The only other code that even comes close to a contribution is code
given to me by Erik Wistrand for handling HTTPS, but this is a minor
chunk of code and he actually gave it to me in the context of OBR, which
I just reused it for Oscar, since he told me to use it any way that I
wanted.
So, yes, I am saying that there are no significant contributions by
anyone else other than myself or from people that have granted me
control of the code.
That simply isn't sufficient justification. Apache projects can use
BSD licensed code from anywhere. BSD-licensed projects only need to
come to apache.org when the existing home is either unfriendly to
collaborative development (e.g., preventing new contributors from
joining in the project) or insufficiently neutral to support the
potential set of contributors (e.g., requiring a nonprofit foundation
environment). There may be other reasons, but those are the ones
we normally see.
That was my motivation. It, along with a litany of other motivations are
part of the proposal. I think the proposal stands on its own.
If Alex had used any of the existing project proposals as a guide,
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/
http://jakarta.apache.org/site/newproject.html
then our requirements for accepting new projects would have been
clearer from the start.
I am sorry, I don't know about that. I thought we did start with the
Harmony project proposal as a guide.
-> richard
