From: Geoff H. <ghu...@ws...> - 2002-03-28 03:33:35
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>> 1) Election of Steering Committee (now effectively those people with >> CVS >> commit access) >> 2) Rules and Procedures for the election and other decision making >> tasks >> 3) Rules and Procedures for working with Corporations >> 4) Governance of Copyright & Licensing >> 5) Code contribution procedures >> >> The charter can be as relaxed and democratic as you wish. I think relaxed is generally the preferred style in the group. ;-) But certainly I think we all would appreciate hearing some genuine legal guidance. I've occasionally wondered whether we're *too* relaxed, esp. in terms of accepting contributed code. (Granted the old saying "beggars can't be choosers," which is why we've generally accepted any code offered that would be useful to the project as a whole.) > shouldn't have to be a whole lot of decisions we need to deliberate on, > once the initial relicensing is done. No, though there might be some thought put into moving away from SourceForge. Not that I'm not grateful for what they've provided, but there have certainly been some bumps along the road. >> For RNT point #4 is the important one. We are trying to establish if >> the >> group is willing to license the HtDig software under both the GPL and >> LGPL. GPL for standard usage, LGPL for usage with 'libhtdig'. To >> accomplish this goal, a steering committee would need to approve such a >> move within the bounds of a group charter. As I mentioned to Neal privately, I'm also all for this concept -- there have been a fair number of "indexing libraries" that I've tried to link with that have come and gone. Many developers in other projects have asked about the concept of a libhtdig (GnuCash, KDE and a few others come to mind) with a simple API. And IMHO, the LGPL is a nice "fit" for a library use. Of course I'm not the only copyright holder. > The only other thing to consider is the Berkeley DB code, which seems to > be licensed not only under the University of California, but also > Harvard It's all BSD-style copyright, which is compatible with LGPL. Otherwise the glibc folks would be sunk, as they include the Berkeley DB too. :-) >> A first step could be to call for a vote to ratify the current >> developers >> with CVS commit access as the steering committee and go forward with >> drafting a charter patterned after the Apache/Debian/FreeBSD etc. I'd obviously defer to legal opinion as well as the list, but I'd prefer to see us mention this to a raft of people who may or may not still subscribe to any ht://Dig mailing lists. In particular, I think everyone on the THANKS list needs to know about this -- even if we don't hear back from them. -Geoff |