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Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:25:55 -0400
From: Shane Curcuru <asf@shanecurcuru.org>
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Subject: Re: OpenOffice and the ASF
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Simon Brouwer wrote on Jun 2, 2011 6:21:30 am:
> I had already been so bold as to adding myself to the list,
> expressing my support to the proposal. I was wondering though. In the
> OpenOffice.org project, many community members contribute in other
> ways than committing code, for example by writing or translating
> documentation, being active in the marketing project, taking part in
> QA. Some concern has been expressed that, if the meritocratic system
> in Apache is based on code contribution only, those community members
> are not able to fully become part of the OpenOffice.org Apache
> project or the Apache community.

I see there are already several excellent responses to this, but I 
thought I'd just point out that I've watched two Apache projects 
recently vote primarily non-code contributors onto their PMCs in recent 
months.  So I don't think this is an issue, especially if a solid 
community forms that is interested in the end-user aspects of what 
OpenOffice.org should be about.

All committers do need to sign the iCLA, which simply grants the ASF the 
appropriate rights to be able to license all our software under the 
Apache License.  The ASF does not use copyright assignments, merely 
licensing under our license.

Committers can checkin code (or documentation, or translations, etc.) 
into whatever projects they have commit rights on - every Apache project 
(or podling, for those in the Incubator) has it's own separate committer 
list.

PMC members actually vote on formal releases, and thus determine how the 
project moves forward on the larger level.  Likewise, podlings have a 
PPMC that helps to form the community and work towards graduation, as 
well as some existing Mentors from the pre-existing Apache community.

As an end-user project, incubating OpenOffice.org will be a somewhat 
different experience from most other Apache projects, which historically 
have happened to be server-side stuff.  But this sounds exciting to me - 
I miss working on software that all sorts of people use, not just geeks 
and sysadmins.

- Shane (reading the archives, so apologies for mis-threading)

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