Users - OFBiz and ASF
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Users - OFBiz and ASF
 
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Re: Users - OFBiz and ASF
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There are probably lots of questions that people have about this, so first I'll say please feel free to ask them here or wherever you feel comfortable (even emailing us directly if need be, though if possible please send it to this list). There are certain things that will change, mostly to comply with ASF policy. This should be viewed as a significant improvement to the project, in spite of the inconvenience and the work required. We have been pretty relaxed about these issues in the past and have a number of things in our SVN repository that if used as is out of the box might subject users to potential legal issues. While these legal issues are probably not too likely or risky for most OFBiz users, they do still exist. One example of this is the transaction management and connection pooling in OFBiz, and for 2 different reasons. We have an objective in the project to be able to use it out of the box, which means we don't want to require download and placement of separate jars and such before it can be built and/or run. We are using JOTM as the default transaction manager, and out of the box it requires Carol, which is LGPL licensed. Andy has played with changing it to run without Carol, but then we'd have a special (ie non-stock) version of the jar and if any issues come up with that change we might be stuck resolving them ourselves. For connection pooling we are using Minerva which is pulled from an old JBoss code base before they changed their licensing, so it is X licensed (a lot like MIT). We don't really own this code so we can't make it part of the ASF project. So, we're looking at a number of options for this. We would like to use Geronimo going forward for technical and community reasons. We may try to use it in an embedded mode, or we may change to have everything in OFBiz load through JMX wrappers instead of the current container stuff that is part of OFBiz. This would hopefully make it easier to deploy OFBiz in any app server that supports JMX. Both of these options need some work, though Andy already has some partial work done on JMX wrappers for everything. There are still some issues there, and because there is no standard way of adding to the classpath with JMX or anything else in app servers, that is still an issue... For other LGPL jars, like JasperReports and Shark and such, we have things in SVN that use them but the libraries are not included and the code that uses them is not build or used by default. For more information on these see the OPTIONAL_LIBRARIES files in the ofbiz home directory. Right now these libraries are in the specialized/ libraries directory. We may try to make sure some central place like this exists for these libraries so you can be sure to get the right version of them and such. This will probably remain in the SVN repository on the Undersun server, which is where everything is now. ========================= In general for the project this move to ASF incubation and hopefully eventually to a full ASF project will not really represent a whole lot of changes for OFBiz or the people and groups involved with it. The reason for this is that we already do things in a way that is very similar to the Apache way. We even use very similar tools, so we can continue using SVN, Jira, etc. OFBiz has always been an independent software project that is not owned by any company. OFBiz is not owned by Undersun, though Undersun along with other companies such as Contegix and Integral sponsor the infrastructure for the project. That will change as the project moves to ASF infrastructure. In general this formalizes the relationship between contributors to OFBiz and "ownership" of the project. The way the Apache license and such works they don't necessarily own the copyright, but have a copyright license grant and based on that the software is distributed through the ASF. This sort of legal structure makes things easier for both contributors to and users of the open source software, which is important for the progress of the project (especially now as it is getting larger, and used in larger companies and such). On a day-to-day basis not much will change in the project, though hopefully the community will continue to expand and the project will perhaps grow at an even faster rate. I also hope that as part of this move to the ASF we will form a team to start focusing on releases again, and even doing branches for releases so that fixes can more easily be back-patched and what not. This would involve some testing and documentation efforts, and will hopefully happen as a first official release of OFBiz after we leave incubation. As far as the incubation process goes: we have been accepted into the Apache Incubator and we will be moving our infrastructure over there. We are dedicated to doing whatever is necessary to get through the incubator process as quickly as possible. Still, the project is not "on-hold" in any way during this process, it is just that certain changes will happen more frequently during that process (like the infrastructure changes, the licensing changes, cleaning up libraries, and so on). Many of these have already started. I think that pretty much sums up the situation now. Again if there are any questions or concerns, this list is the place to go over them for now. We will start discussing details more publicly on the dev list too, for those who want to watch the more internal issues of the project. -David On Feb 6, 2006, at 12:11 PM, David Welton wrote: > On 2/6/06, Andrew Sykes <[hidden email]> wrote: >> Can we get a bit more information about this as things progress >> please, >> there's been little said about this since David's initial >> proposition... > > Fair enough - here's what the situation is from my point of view: > > OFBiz was accepted for 'incubation' at the Apache Software Foundation > with this proposal: > > http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OFBizProposal > > What that entails is a gradual migration to ASF resources (mailing > lists, JIRA, subversion, web pages, wiki and so on), and that for the > duration of Incubation, OFBiz will be, to some degree, 'under the > lense' so to speak, to make sure it is suitable for inclusion as a > proper ASF project. The criteria are available in the pages posted > previously, but I think that OFBiz more or less meets them already (or > I wouldn't have proposed it), so hopefully things will go smoothly. > Myself, and J Aaron Farr are the official 'mentors' for OFBiz, with > Yoav Shapira and Martin van den Bemt declaring their interest to help > out some. That doesn't mean that we have any control over the > direction of OFBIz - that's decided by the people who write it. > Rather, we're here to help out with the bureaucracy and integration > into the ASF. > > I'll let the OFBiz guys themselves add to this as they see fit. > > Does that help some? > -- > David N. Welton > - http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/ > > Linux, Open Source Consulting > - http://www.dedasys.com/ > > _______________________________________________ > Users mailing list > [hidden email] > http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/users _______________________________________________ Users mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/users |
smime.p7s (3K)
Re: Users - OFBiz and ASF
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Re: Users - OFBiz and ASF
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