On the legal protection: The idea is that if some one uses wave for something and some how incurs some damages, they could sue the contributors directly. There is nothing stopping them from looking at the current committer list and suing us directly. When this was a Google project, google would protect their employees. When this is an open source project there is no organization protecting us.
It doesn't really matter what the license is and if it says there are no warranties or not. Some one can still sue you. They may have expensive lawyers. The apache foundation will shield any such litigation from the contributors and has legal counsel which can fight that battle. This is one of the reasons it is important for them to be a 501(c) (3). Lots of corporations and individuals donate to Apache which is how they can afford to pay lawyers. If we got it alone we have no such protections. On The Community: The other point here is that we would be joining a community which has guidelines, bylaws, infrastructure, etc that is proven to work well for open source project and produces high quality, high value results. Currently, there are still a few Google Resources which are driving the wave development. For now they still have a majority control over what is going on. In the very near future that will no longer be the case. When that happens, how do we make decisions? How do we govern ourselves. If the a Google resource wants to do X and I want to do Y, how do we resolve that. Sure there are lots of ways we could decide to handle those situations, but I would argue that we would sit around and debate the governance process for several months with the irony being, "how do you DECIDE on a governance strategy without a governance strategy?". The point being Apache has a system set up that works. Their products gain traction, their communities function well. They have mentors that are willing to work with us to help us develop in to a well organized open source community. These mentors have gone through this before and are willing to donate their time to share their experience. If we go it alone we run the risk of being paralyzed right out of the gate. On The Copyright Enforcement: What if tomorrow we seem some start up company selling Wave in a Box with a commercial license that violates our license. Do you want to pay for a lawyer to rectify the situation our of your own pocket. If we go with apache, they will handle the situation for us. On Dec 1, 12:36 pm, Vega <[email protected]> wrote: > I am not against joining. But it seems to me that the decision is > enthusiastic, however, all benefits are somewhat potential, while > limitations are immediate. Also, there's no need for hurry. We have > more important goals to concentrate on right now. Why spend a lot of > time on moving to Apache infrastructure right now? Why go with the > mailing list while we can use the WIAB dog food instance? Why move to > svn instead of mercurial? Why Apache? is it the only alternative? > Maybe Wave doesn't need the "Apache" prefix? How about the Wiab > potential users? What are the consequences for them? > I am sorry I sound negative, but it seems to me that everybody are > happy to find a new home, while no one wants to evaluate the risks. > > On Dec 1, 9:13 pm, Ian Roughley <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > > On 12/01/2010 01:50 PM, Vega wrote: > > > > The wave team has a very demanding goal - to have a functional version > > > working out out the box - as soon as possible, and it seems to me that > > > working on joining Apache now, only distracts us from working toward > > > reaching the main goal. > > > What do you mean by wave team? As I understand it, officially there is > > none, or after Dec/Jan will > > be no official time for Googlers to be spend on WiAB. > > > And even if they did finish getting a stand alone version, this is a RI > > that needs a lot of work. > > > By joining Apache, we have a community and process for others to join the > > team and help out and to > > progress the project. Building up the contributors to the project is a > > very important goal, as is > > having a name that people trust when they go to use open source. > > > /Ian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Wave Protocol" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol?hl=en.
