Hi Bjorn,
thanks for the answer.
I think I do see the extra value of getting
known-to-be-IP-clean
3rd party libs from Eclipse. I also understand that
reviewing
3rd party libs is more effort then reviewing EPL
contributions.
And I guess I'm OK with a Jan.31st cutoff date for 3rd
party
libs.
I think that my main concern of threatening contributions
away
would be addressed if there were a clear separation
between
3rd party contributions and EPL contributions [probably
handled
even by different people?] and knowing that EPL
contributions
are possible even after Jan.31st.
At some time, Janet said they were trying to address
plain-EPL
contributions like medium size bugfixes within a 2 week
timeframe.
I guess I'd be happy if that would actually work, and I
could live
with 3rd party contributions taking much
longer.
Thanks,
--
Martin
Oberhuber
Wind River Systems, Inc.
Target Management Project Lead, DSDP
PMC Member
http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm
Martin (and everyone else involved in Europa),
But let me also say that I'm sort of alarmed by the
fact that the cutoff date for 3rd
party contributions is Jan.31st for a release targeted
end of June.
You'll pleased(?) to know that
it alarms us at the EMO as well. However, Janet and her team spent a fair
amount of time trying to determine how much work there will be and what
deadline was needed in order to accomplish the work before the Europa
release.
...
due to lack of resources. Is there a bottleneck? How
does that compare to
other Open Source initiatives like Apache or
Sourceforge?
Apache and Sourceforge do not
vett third-party contributions; Eclipse does. This IP cleanliness guarantee is
a clear value to the Eclipse members. Consequently, the Board of Directors
requires all Eclipse projects to continue to follow the defined IP Policy. The
EMO is not at liberty to change that Policy.
But it feels like there's a desperate need for good ideas how to
improve things.
Perhaps it would help to find ways how we can better
leverage and pull 3rd party
libraries out of their native homes at runtime rather
than investing so much time
into finding out whether we can redistribute them
ourselves? - Anybody with
good ideas please speak
up!
The problem isn't where the libraries come
from but rather whether they are IP clean. You can probably figure out some
work around the rules where you download the libraries from another place but
(a) many of them are explicitly not allowed by the IP Policy (i.e., you're not
the first to think of this idea) and (b) no matter where the libraries come
from (eclipse.org distros or other places), the Members still want the
libraries to be vetted. And it turns out that vetting third-party code is a
very painfully slow process.
We'll talk more about this at the
face-to-face meetings in San Francisco in a week and a half. I will even have
some advice from the legal team on what you can do to help speed up the
reviews of your contributions.