Open Source Development Requirements

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This page captures current thinking about the requirements we have for an open source development process that we would use for collaborative development of the OpenAjax Hub and other future technologies that we might develop.

  • RATIONALE - The need for open source hosting place and process: OpenAjax Alliance needs a place and a process to facilitate and manage open source code. We have already produced some code now, and I expect us to see more code going forward. Though we have not specified our roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months, I expect that we will cover either more subjects or more in-depth in the subjects we cover today. So the code will evolve. Further, contributors will evolve as well. Some active contributors may become inactive and new contributors may show up. As a result, we need to follow a good open source process to manage and facilitate the evolving code as well as contributors.

The following is a list of requirements I see (some of them are from Jon’s original email):

  • MUST have the set of tools and features that we need to have an effective collaborative development process
  • MUST enable building a robust developer community so that: 1. even if initial contributors become inactive for whatever reason, the code is still maintained and we can still move forward; 2. Encourage developers to participate (help bug fix, testing, documentation, etc) and collaborate;
  • MUST conform to our approach for intellectual property (open, non-exclusive, royalty free, unemcumbered, e.g., compatible with the Apache v2 license)
  • MUST allow the OpenAjax Alliance membership to have reasonable confidence of control over the software that we are developing jointly. One means for control is a very specific charter statement that says that this particular open source project (assuming open source) develops software strictly according to specifications from the OpenAjax Alliance.
  • SHOULD be lightweight from a process and setup perspective. We need to move quickly and we don't have a lot of time to author proposals and meet with review boards.
  • MUST NOT result in industry perception of favoritism towards a particular member (or actually reflect favoritism to a particular member)
  • SHOULD be hosted at a credible organization that would help and reinforce OpenAjax’s credibility (for example, becoming one out of the 150,000 projects at SourceForge is not very helpful).


Added after discussion in Markup committee:

  • MUST provide what we need and MUST NOT have requirements we cannot support.
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