Re: [DISCUSS] incorporate EPL Aether

[Brett Porter <br...@apache.org>]

On 31/07/2011, at 6:04 AM, Benson Margulies wrote:

> Kristian,
> 
> legal-discuss is a public list, with public archives. You can go read
> these remarks for yourself in the archive. I apologize for assuming
> that you or anyone else didn't know that. Yes I am a member, but Ralph
> and I are not quoting any private crap.
> 
> Note that some Ralph posed a relatively specific legal question to
> start with, and then it grew and grew into a more complex policy
> discussion that board members happened to participate in. If you want
> a clear statement of the board's view, you can ask the board. The
> board in general would, I bet, rather get a coherent question from the
> PMC chair in the monthly report, and deal with that, but nothing stops
> you from sending email to board@ stating your view of the question at
> hand and asking for clarification.

That's all true.

I noticed a few people talk about "board policy" in this thread, and I think it's important to be clear on a couple of things. Board policy is nowhere near as heavy handed as some here may think - in particular, the board does not dictate any technical direction for a project. In the interest of protecting the Foundation, they will however ensure that all legal obligations are being met, that a project has a healthy development community, and that it is aligned with the principles of the ASF.

As far as I can tell, these are all the policies relevant to this discussion:

http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html#3party
http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-a
http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-b
http://maven.apache.org/developers/dependency-policies.html

The statements made on legal-discuss have some significant weight given who made them, though I don't think they intended them to be ad-hoc policy making on behalf of the board. The comments were not so much policy setting as they are just common sense. Don't risk the project by bringing in a codebase that the main copyright holder doesn't want you to. Don't let a major piece of functionality be developed outside of the project in the first place.

I will specifically mention that as a board member myself, my comments on this list should not be treated as a statement from the board unless I've said otherwise :)

Cheers,
Brett

--
Brett Porter
brett@apache.org
http://brettporter.wordpress.com/
http://au.linkedin.com/in/brettporter





---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@maven.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@maven.apache.org