Open Source

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About this wiki page

This wiki page describes all of the open source projects conducted by or on behalf of the OpenAjax Alliance. As of now, there is just one such open source project, the "OpenAjax Alliance" project at SourceForge.

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"OpenAjax Alliance" project at SourceForge

The OpenAjax Alliance has initiated an "OpenAjax Alliance" open source project at SourceForge.

This first thing to be developed within this project is the OpenAjax Hub.

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Executive summary of current status

We are still in the middle of setting up the open source project at SourceForge. See below for information about how things are progressing so far and decisions that have been made about how things should be run.

At this point, we have to address the issue of "contributor license agreements". During a meeting in Ausut, the consensus in the Declarative Markup committee is that we need to make sure that all contributors agree that all source code contributions are to be available to the world under the Apache v2 license agreement. However, SourceForge does not appear to force contributors to formally agree to the license agreement to which the given project adheres.

There will be a special phone call to discuss this issue as follows:

  • Subject: Contributor agreements for code contributors to SourceForge project
  • Date/Time: Friday, 8 September, 9am-California, noon-NewYork, 6pmParis
  • Phone#: 1-888-227-9220
  • Passcode: 871757

Here are two approaches that we could take towards "contributor license agreements":

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IBM recommendation: Just send email that references the Members Agreement

IBM recommends that contributors send a simple email that states that all contributions are under the terms of the Members Agreement.

One key advantage to this approach is that we will have only one document that says what the IPR rules are for Contributions to the SourceForge project - the Members Agreement. (Actually, the IPR section of the Members Agreement.) Therefore, we won't have a separate Individual Contributor License Agreement or a separate Corporate Contributor License Agreement. (Also, there are a few extra details in the OpenAjax Alliance IPR policy has more provisions that the Apache CLA due to its section on Covered Claims.)

Under this approach, the home page for the SourceForge project will say that the project is managed by the OpenAjax Alliance and that all material within the project is covered by the Alliance's IPR policy within the Members Agreement (with URL to the Members Agreement).

From the home page, a potential Contributor will be able to find a standard form that any Contributor (Member or Non-Member) to the SourceForge project must fill out and send which states the following:

  • Whether he is contributing material as a representative of a Member company or not (i.e. he is a Non-Member). If a Member, identify the company.
  • Confirm that all of his contributions are subject to the Alliance's IPR policy (with URL to the Members Agreement).
  • Confirm that he is the original author of all contributions that he is submitting.

This approach allows anyone involved in the Alliance to start contributing right away, even before their company signs the Members Agreement, because the only thing that matters from a legal perspective is that each individual Contributor acknowledges that his particular contributions are covered by the Members Agreement.

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Alternate approach: have a separate Contributor License Agreement like Apache and Dojo

Most likely we will have to adopt a process whereby all contributors to the project must fill out and sign an appropriate Contributor License Agreement, similar to what exists at Apache (http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt and http://www.apache.org/licenses/cla-corporate.txt) and Dojo (http://dojotoolkit.org/icla.txt), before the Project Admin will allow them to join the open source project.

One straightforward solution to the CLA issue is to do what Dojo has done, which is to clone the Apache Contributor License Agreement(s) and replace "Apache Foundation" with "OpenAjax Alliance", but this solution still requires discussion. For OpenAjax Alliance, which has some large companies as members, we might want to provide both an individual CLA and a corporate CLA.

Once we have addressed the issue of contributor license agreements, then we should be able to check in code and begin feverish work on completing the OpenAjax Hub version 1.

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Project initialization

You can see the information that was submitted to SourceForge as part of the new project application process here:

The email that indicates approval of the new project that was sent by SourceForge on 23August2006 is here:

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Project management issues

The following project management issues were discussed at the 24 August Declarative Markup committee (Markup Minutes 2006-08-24).

  • SVN or CVS
    • Proposal presented to Markup Committee on 24Aug: SVN
    • Consensus in Markup Committee: Agree, SVN
  • Secure SVN?
    • Proposal presented to Markup Committee on 24Aug: The SourceForge web site talks about HTTPS access to the project SVN repository. If there is an option for HTTP vs HTTPS, we want HTTPS, don't we?
    • Consensus in Markup Committee: Agree, HTTPS
  • Project admins
    • Proposal presented to Markup Committee on 24Aug: Jon Ferraiolo for now. Add other admins later if there is strong evidence of ongoing commitment.
    • Consensus in Markup Committee: Two admins initially, Jon Ferraiolo as primary and James Margaris as backup
  • Project members
    • Proposal presented to Markup Committee on 24Aug: Adopt a generally permissive approach for people who want to contribute to the project. In general, anyone who works for an OpenAjax Alliance member company is allowed to join the SourceForge project. We also allow people not associated with the Alliance to join the open source project.
    • Consensus in Markup Committee: Tentative yes, but Jon was given the ACTION to verify that everyone who contributes is somehow forced to agree with an appropriate "contributor license". Subsequent research shows that SourceForge does not force contributors to agree to an appropriate contributor license, so this question needs to be revisited. One straightforward solution is to do what Dojo has done, which is to clone the Apache Contributor License Agreement(s) and replace "Apache Foundation" with "OpenAjax Alliance", but this solution still requires discussion.
  • Permissions
    • Proposal presented to Markup Committee on 24Aug: Initially, assume everyone on the project is professional, trustworthy and capable, which means all developers have read/write access to entire source tree. (We can put restrictions on in the future.)
    • Consensus in Markup Committee: Agree, at least at the start of the project
  • Project web site at SourceForge
    • Proposal presented to Markup Committee on 24Aug: Clearly state that the mission of the SourceForge project is to implement the technologies defined by OpenAjax Alliance and to implement associated tools around those projects (e.g., JavaScript collision detection tools).
    • Consensus in Markup Committee: Agree
  • Which trackers?
    • Proposal presented to Markup Committee on 24Aug: Set up our project to support all available SourceForge trackers: Bug Reports, Support Requests, Feature Requests, user-submitted Patches.
    • Consensus in Markup Committee: Agree
  • Forums?
    • Proposal presented to Markup Committee on 24Aug: No forums at this time. Mail lists should be sufficient.
    • Consensus in Markup Committee: Agree
  • Maillists
    • Proposal presented to Markup Committee on 24Aug: Initially, create two mail lists, one for the general public and one that is private to the members of the project.
    • Consensus in Markup Committee: Agree
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Initial source code submission

To keep everything clean from an IP perspective:

  • Alex needs to check in his oaa.js
  • James needs to check in his markup scanner
  • Lindsey needs to check in his collision detection logic
  • Anyone else who has worked on preliminary code for the OpenAjax Hub needs to check his code into the SourceForge project
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Things that each contributor needs to do

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