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Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:23:45 -0500
From: "William A. Rowe Jr." <wrowe@rowe-clan.net>
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To: general@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal
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On 6/1/2011 1:24 PM, robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:
> Ross Gardler <rgardler@apache.org> wrote on 06/01/2011 12:21:23 PM:
> 
>> There are only two initial committers identified in the proposal. Why 
>> only two for such a large codebase?
> 
> We could have put a much longer list of IBM names on this list, developers 
> familiar with the code base via their work on Lotus Symphony (which is our 
> OpenOffice based project).  But then we could have been criticized for the 
> proposal being too dominated by IBM.  It is clearly our intent to grow 
> this project, both from our corporate developers, but also by recruiting 
> new members to the project, including developers from related open source 
> projects (see my previous note) 

The ASF preference (which you already know) is for individual IBM developers
to add themselves to the effort.  A large representation by IBM, or Novell,
or any other part of the ecosystem is not itself a problem.  But there is
an apathy towards individuals who are 'signed up' to a project, and who do
not volunteer themselves.

On a related note, is it Oracle's intent to prohibit participation at this
ASF project, or are interested developers (particularly previous developers)
permitted to participate on their own time?

> From a practical perspective it would have been impossible to do all of 
> that recruitment without this proposal becoming public prematurely. So the 
> majority of the recruitment will occur during incubation.  We obviously 
> don't graduate from incubation with only two.  But it should be enough to 
> get the ball rolling. 

Understood.  Looking forward to Sam's response to the 'sign yourself up'
discussion which Jim already responded to.

> Oracle owns the copyright to the code and is is the one legally permitted 
> to contribute it under Apache 2.0 license.  This is because they required 
> copyright assignment to Sun/Oracle as part of their CLA for OpenOffice. So 
> they aggregated and owned all copyrights.  But that does not mean that 
> they were the sole developers on OpenOffice.org  And they are not the sole 
> contributors on this proposal.

I've reviewed http://www.openoffice.org/license.html and the code providence
doesn't seem to be a serious obstacle to entering incubation.  However, there
is this;

  Other Works

  Our preference is always for contributions of editable work. But in those
  cases where editable material is difficult to obtain, there are several
  options; all presume you hold copyright in the work:

    * You can sign the OCA, which covers all work (and not just code)
      contributed to OpenOffice.org by you;

    * If your country's laws allow it, you can make it public domain by
      declaring as much in a signed document (check if it is possible, first!);
      or

    * You can use the Creative Commons Attribution License ("Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5").
      We only accept work under this license that is non-editable and for which
      there is no editable version that can be contributed to the project.

This last item concerns me.  How much of the contribution is unusable due
to the "Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5" tag, which would appear to be a category X
license to ASF works?  (I couldn't find a corresponding Jira in the legal
discuss tracker.)


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