Re: [eclipse.org-architecture-council] IPZilla rant

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 5:52 PM, Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

the licensing of all those npm modules are pretty suspect making it questionable whether we can even get approval for all this.

I've opened many CQs and enjoyed seeing the most of them automatically approved based on header analysis, or manually approved by IP team checking project metadata or README. There are a few strange cases, but as the submitter, I didn't find those really slowing me down or demotivating in the contribution process. I'm just crossing fingers because if one of those npm modules is declined, the whole project will have to be canceled as our team of contributors doesn't have the resources of working around legal issues on those npm parts.

I trust that the IP team will give a fair judgment here, and their opinion on those modules is IMO an added value of moving to Eclipse.org.

So overall, I don't felt that questionable IP was a reason to me for not submitting the project to Eclipse.org, it's almost the contrary (free IP audit!)

This is likely a discussion mainly for the board level since they make the rules.

Depends on which rules, and based on my short experience, I have the feeling as developers, we make more rules that affect our peers than what the Board can make, and it's better like this!

The Architecture Council does the EDP, the Board probably has an approval to give here and there IIRC, but it's not really in a good position to propose changes directly to the EDP, and this is not something we should expect the Board to do. It's our role as AC members to keep the EDP good for the community, and it's our fault if it's not ;)

The Board can probably influence in prioritization if some of its members (including the 2 committers reps) find one of the services offered by the Foundation isn't of sufficient quality, or if they think the Foundation should start a new service or stop another one; but it's more about the big picture Foundation strategy and resource assignment, not really about the enforcement nor improvement of some technical or legal processes.

At this point, I hardly see how the Board can nor should discuss it more and better than we do in the AC. Or maybe there is an underlying question really related to the Foundation strategy I missed?

 

But I believe we have influence as the body of technical leaders at Eclipse. We managed to figure this out with Maven. And, yeah, npm modules tend to be smaller and more plentiful. What is our recommendation of changes that need to be done to support contributing to the _javascript_ ecosystem as richly as we’ve contributed to the Java one?

 

In this case, instead of filing 60 CQs, the dream scenario would have been to fill a few top-level ones, give the node module info (id, version), and automatically have this resolved, 60 entries created at ones, sources fetched automatically whenever possible (in the vast majority of cases, there's a trivial git tag for the version), and some emails saying "PMC approved" and "this has been automatically approved" (like there is already after source submission).