Re: Users - Apache Software Foundation
Posted by David E. Jones on Dec 01, 2005; 7:45am
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/Users-Apache-Software-Foundation-tp136603p136608.html
David and others,
This is an interesting discussion and I think one that should
continue, though I have concerns about the feasibility right now.
There has been quite a bit of discussion about moving to the Apache
2.0 license, which is something that has been considered for quite a
while. This is somewhat independent of the idea of moving OFBiz under
the ASF umbrella, though is probably necessary for that. The biggest
issue with the change of license is trying to mitigate the risk of a
contributor complaining, perhaps though legal action, of the change
and claiming copyright and/or license infringement stemming from
copyright assignment issues. Right now under the MIT license the
copyright assignment is only implicit, and there is a risk that it
won't hold up in court (in some places like Europe evidently a _very_
big risk). To get around this safely we need to get every contributor
to sign a copyright assignment form to "The Open For Business
Project". To get that done we probably need to reorganize it as a non-
profit company or a trust of some sort. Currently it is a partnership
and was _only_ organized to prevent someone else from organizing
under the name and claiming ownership of the copyright... A bloody
mess and not one that is cheap or easy to clean up.
I am also concerned about some culture clash and certain policies
that are part of Apache. These have proven themselves very
effectively but seem to mostly involve infrastructure projects and
the larger ones usually have some corporate sponsorship, often in the
form of dedicating a certain number of employee hours to the project.
What concerns me is that OFBiz, especially the business applications
level, is not funded by any corporation and is not as easy to define
or draw a line around as a piece of infrastructure software. I may be
wrong but my impression from interactions with Apache and projects
there, and from what I have read (including from the links that David
sent earlier in this thread), is that it may add more overhead and
limit flexibility in a way that is dangerous for a project like OFBiz
that is already about as resource starved as it can be without
folding...
I don't mean to cast a negative light on the way the project is run
now, but it is something that requires a difficult combination of
flexibility and consistency. There is no corporation behind the
project and the core contributors pretty much make a living by
providing services and solutions based on the software in a small
business environment, with clients that are mostly medium sized
businesses. This is actually working out pretty well to keep the
project going and growing, and especially in the last year we have
seen a huge explosion of business level functionality in the project.
This provides for an excellent and flexible collaboration
environment, though it is I think often frustratingly chaotic for
those used to a "tell me what to do" type of vendor like Oracle or
SAP, or almost worse the packages intended for small and medium sized
companies like QuickBooks or Navision or any of a myriad of similar
products.
In the end I think what we need is some pretty "big" people who are
interested in pushing this. We need legal help, organizational help,
and probably documentation and technical help to better meet some of
the Apache standards, at least from a review perspective.
Perhaps a bigger issue is the direction that Apache wants to go with
business level open source applications, if they want to go in that
direction at all... My feedback from people at larger corporations
(like Novell, Sun, IBM, etc) has varied between indifferent to openly
hostile. Apache has pretty close ties to larger corporations and so I
would be _very_ interested to see the opinions of people inside
Apache on the topic of open source business applications. Even if
they are interested in seeing that sort of thing go forward, the
ideas about how to approach it can vary a LOT. This would include
things like the tool set to use (often there is a preference for
object oriented everything, ie persistence, web services interfaces,
user interfaces, and on and on, and this conflicts with the service
and relational oriented approach of OFBiz), and would also include
things like whether there should be one big project, like OFBiz is,
or a bunch of little more specialized projects (which is the mess you
get outside of the happy OFBiz world... ;) ).
Fortunately for everyone reading this I'm out of time for tonight and
have an early training call in the morning... I look forward to any
comments anyone might have on this, or connections to "big" people
that we could get feedback from about these ideas.
-David
On Nov 30, 2005, at 4:05 AM, David Welton wrote:
>> You made this point in your last email...
>>
>> "Some of it is just formalization of good practices, like handing out
>> commit priviledges."
>>
>> Can you elaborate on this please. OFBiz being as big and complex
>> as it
>> is, if "good practice" led to liberalisation in this area I'm sure it
>> would raise a few eyebrows. I feel that the careful control David (E.
>> Jones) applies in this area is rather reassuring.
>
> I think this is mostly explained by different bits scattered around
> the web site:
>
> http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#meritocracy
>
> "When the group felt that the person had "earned" the merit to be part
> of the development community, they granted direct access to the code
> repository, thus increasing the group and increasing the ability of
> the group to develop the program, and to maintain and develop it more
> effectively.
>
> We call this basic principle "meritocracy": literally, govern of
> merit."
>
> http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#roles
>
> Basically, ofbiz would not gain any new committers by joining the ASF
> - at least not right away. It's a priviledge to be earned, not
> something to be handed out in the hopes that people start writing
> code! Initially, I would see David Jones as being the "Vice President
> of OFBiz", some configuration of long-term committers as the Project
> Management Committee (PMC), and any other committers who are for
> whatever reason not interested or able in taking part in the project's
> direction as committers. Myself and hopefully one or two other
> people would initially be part of the PMC as "oversight" and as a
> bridge to the rest of the ASF - but not to set technical direction. I
> would most likely bow out of that capacity once things were stable and
> ofbiz was well integrated with the ASF.
>
> Over time, hopefully more people would become interested in the
> project, and at that point, I think we'd want to see proven people get
> access - if that didn't happen, I think it would be indicative of a
> problem. However, OFBiz already has handed out access to a select,
> but diverse group of people, something that encouraged me to propose
> this idea.
>
> --
> 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
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/Users-Apache-Software-Foundation-tp136603p136608.html
David and others,
This is an interesting discussion and I think one that should
continue, though I have concerns about the feasibility right now.
There has been quite a bit of discussion about moving to the Apache
2.0 license, which is something that has been considered for quite a
while. This is somewhat independent of the idea of moving OFBiz under
the ASF umbrella, though is probably necessary for that. The biggest
issue with the change of license is trying to mitigate the risk of a
contributor complaining, perhaps though legal action, of the change
and claiming copyright and/or license infringement stemming from
copyright assignment issues. Right now under the MIT license the
copyright assignment is only implicit, and there is a risk that it
won't hold up in court (in some places like Europe evidently a _very_
big risk). To get around this safely we need to get every contributor
to sign a copyright assignment form to "The Open For Business
Project". To get that done we probably need to reorganize it as a non-
profit company or a trust of some sort. Currently it is a partnership
and was _only_ organized to prevent someone else from organizing
under the name and claiming ownership of the copyright... A bloody
mess and not one that is cheap or easy to clean up.
I am also concerned about some culture clash and certain policies
that are part of Apache. These have proven themselves very
effectively but seem to mostly involve infrastructure projects and
the larger ones usually have some corporate sponsorship, often in the
form of dedicating a certain number of employee hours to the project.
What concerns me is that OFBiz, especially the business applications
level, is not funded by any corporation and is not as easy to define
or draw a line around as a piece of infrastructure software. I may be
wrong but my impression from interactions with Apache and projects
there, and from what I have read (including from the links that David
sent earlier in this thread), is that it may add more overhead and
limit flexibility in a way that is dangerous for a project like OFBiz
that is already about as resource starved as it can be without
folding...
I don't mean to cast a negative light on the way the project is run
now, but it is something that requires a difficult combination of
flexibility and consistency. There is no corporation behind the
project and the core contributors pretty much make a living by
providing services and solutions based on the software in a small
business environment, with clients that are mostly medium sized
businesses. This is actually working out pretty well to keep the
project going and growing, and especially in the last year we have
seen a huge explosion of business level functionality in the project.
This provides for an excellent and flexible collaboration
environment, though it is I think often frustratingly chaotic for
those used to a "tell me what to do" type of vendor like Oracle or
SAP, or almost worse the packages intended for small and medium sized
companies like QuickBooks or Navision or any of a myriad of similar
products.
In the end I think what we need is some pretty "big" people who are
interested in pushing this. We need legal help, organizational help,
and probably documentation and technical help to better meet some of
the Apache standards, at least from a review perspective.
Perhaps a bigger issue is the direction that Apache wants to go with
business level open source applications, if they want to go in that
direction at all... My feedback from people at larger corporations
(like Novell, Sun, IBM, etc) has varied between indifferent to openly
hostile. Apache has pretty close ties to larger corporations and so I
would be _very_ interested to see the opinions of people inside
Apache on the topic of open source business applications. Even if
they are interested in seeing that sort of thing go forward, the
ideas about how to approach it can vary a LOT. This would include
things like the tool set to use (often there is a preference for
object oriented everything, ie persistence, web services interfaces,
user interfaces, and on and on, and this conflicts with the service
and relational oriented approach of OFBiz), and would also include
things like whether there should be one big project, like OFBiz is,
or a bunch of little more specialized projects (which is the mess you
get outside of the happy OFBiz world... ;) ).
Fortunately for everyone reading this I'm out of time for tonight and
have an early training call in the morning... I look forward to any
comments anyone might have on this, or connections to "big" people
that we could get feedback from about these ideas.
-David
On Nov 30, 2005, at 4:05 AM, David Welton wrote:
>> You made this point in your last email...
>>
>> "Some of it is just formalization of good practices, like handing out
>> commit priviledges."
>>
>> Can you elaborate on this please. OFBiz being as big and complex
>> as it
>> is, if "good practice" led to liberalisation in this area I'm sure it
>> would raise a few eyebrows. I feel that the careful control David (E.
>> Jones) applies in this area is rather reassuring.
>
> I think this is mostly explained by different bits scattered around
> the web site:
>
> http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#meritocracy
>
> "When the group felt that the person had "earned" the merit to be part
> of the development community, they granted direct access to the code
> repository, thus increasing the group and increasing the ability of
> the group to develop the program, and to maintain and develop it more
> effectively.
>
> We call this basic principle "meritocracy": literally, govern of
> merit."
>
> http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#roles
>
> Basically, ofbiz would not gain any new committers by joining the ASF
> - at least not right away. It's a priviledge to be earned, not
> something to be handed out in the hopes that people start writing
> code! Initially, I would see David Jones as being the "Vice President
> of OFBiz", some configuration of long-term committers as the Project
> Management Committee (PMC), and any other committers who are for
> whatever reason not interested or able in taking part in the project's
> direction as committers. Myself and hopefully one or two other
> people would initially be part of the PMC as "oversight" and as a
> bridge to the rest of the ASF - but not to set technical direction. I
> would most likely bow out of that capacity once things were stable and
> ofbiz was well integrated with the ASF.
>
> Over time, hopefully more people would become interested in the
> project, and at that point, I think we'd want to see proven people get
> access - if that didn't happen, I think it would be indicative of a
> problem. However, OFBiz already has handed out access to a select,
> but diverse group of people, something that encouraged me to propose
> this idea.
>
> --
> 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
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