On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 10:14 AM, Alex Harui aha...@adobe.com wrote:
Hi Former Mentors,
We’ve had some generous offers of code donations. I noticed that some
projects have votes about whether to accept code donations, but we haven’t
for any Adobe donations to Apache Flex. Is voting optional?
I think there is some ambiguity with regard to how donations are accepted.
Honestly, I'm not an expert on these matters. I believe this page is the
canonical source for how to handle donations:
http://incubator.apache.org/ip-clearance/index.html
Unfortunately, I've been covered up with family and work matters and really
haven't been able to follow things as I should around here recently. Sorry
about that. So I'm not familiar with the specific scenarios you are
speaking of. But, generally, I can see the following scenarios:
1) An individual develops code and donates that to Apache.
2) An open-source project decides to donate code to an Apache project.
3) A private company donates code to a project.
Scenario 1 is easy. If the individual is a committer, he/she can simply
commit the code. If the individual is not a committer he/she can submit the
code via a Jira patch or through the IP Clearance process (it's usually
safer to use the IP Clearance process in this case).
Scenario 3 is not too hard. The company has legal ownership of the code so
the onus is on them to decide whether they have provenance to donate it.
This is the most common use of the page I linked to above and it's how the
Flex code came in from Adobe.
Scenario 2 is more complicated. Contributions to the code may have come
from different sources and all owners must agree to the donation. That can
be tricky.
The IP Clearance form linked from the page above contains a line item for
the PMC voting to accept responsibility for the code. We didn't do that
with the Adobe code because the Adobe donation was part of the proposal for
the Incubating project. Note that the page says it's not for new
projects. The vote to accept that code came when the Incubator PMC voted
to accept the project into the Incubator. I think the best approach if we
are talking about scenario 2 or scenario 1 with a non-committer is to hold
a formal vote. Even if scenario 1 comes from a committer, holding a vote
makes everything clear to anyone who may come along wondering later.
Either way, I think a significant code donation from an external party
works best if it goes through the IP Clearance process. It just makes sure
everything is in order as it should be. If it's just a few files that a
committer drew up on his/her own, then there's nothing wrong with
committing the code to the repo and holding a simple vote. But anything
more than that would be better done through the IP Clearance process. And a
formal vote is implied, if not required, by that process.
Hope that helps.
Greg
