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Live Q&A With Outercurve Foundation President Jim Jagielski
Jim Jagielski is one of the co-founders of the Apache Software Foundation, a director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), new President of the Outercurve Foundation, and as we mentioned yesterday, your interview subject for the next two hours. Mr. Jagielski will be answering your questions below until 2:00 ET (18:00 GMT). Please keep it to one question per post so everyone gets a chance.
Update: 2pm ET has come and gone. Mr. Jagielski might stick around for a bit and answer questions later so make sure to check back. A big thanks to him for his time and answers! Here's a link to his user page where you can read all his responses.
Update: 2pm ET has come and gone. Mr. Jagielski might stick around for a bit and answer questions later so make sure to check back. A big thanks to him for his time and answers! Here's a link to his user page where you can read all his responses.
Outercurve accepts projects from anyplace, although it's true that many of come from MS or have a distinct MS orientation. But that it common with all foundations when they start. After all, the Apache Software Foundation started w/ "just" Apache; Eclipse w/ Eclipse and even the Linux Foundation was about Linux itself. But foundations grow beyond their initial roots, and that's what we're doing w/ Outercurve.
As long as Oracle controls the EA and JCP, and it does, believe me, there's no way that Harmony could be rebooted since their requirements for access to the TCK would prevent Apache from releasing Harmony as a real Open Source project, no matter what the license of the project.
First of all, Github isn't a foundation. It's infrastructure. If all you want and need is someplace to host your project, Github is fine.
If, however, you want to build a *community* around your project, then you need the sort of help and guidance that a foundation provides. ASF, Eclipse, Outercurve, et.al. have some underlying "requirements" regarding that (for example, at the ASF the project must be under the ALv2, at Eclipse it must be the EPL (although there are ways around that)). Outercurve has the lowest barrier to that. OC doesn't force one license or another (it must be an Open Source license though), nor does it force a particular governance model, nor a specific infrastructure. In fact, I would suggest that people who are hosting their projects @ Github and really want them to be a viable Open Source project, *needs* a foundation like Outercurve to help them make that transition. Most projects on Github don't even have an associated LICENSE. Sweet Sassy Molassy!
Dashing good looks. Expert coding skills. Oratory skills of a god. And exceptional humility.
The whole DNT issue is now over and done...
I am passionate about Open Source. So anything I can do to help with that, especially when it's directed towards the grassroots developers and their projects, I am drawn to. Being asked to be President allows for Outercurve to really ramp up the efforts started by Sam Ramji in making Outercurve an influential foundation.
Plus, I'm out of my mind. :)
What efforts would *you* like to see Outercurve (or whoever) take on to benefit the FLOSS community??
Open Source will take over the world... Hadoop will be one, of many, open source projects that enable that.
Without a license, whatever code you produce is assumed to be under a copyright. That means legally people can't make copies, etc... A License is what provides the freedoms and openness required to allow people to see your code, share your code, distribute your code, etc...
That's why all those projects on Github that don't have a license are soooooo scary. Even though you can fork, etc, you have no real *rights* to do much of anything which the code. It's the license which grants those rights and freedoms.
Well, the question assumes that Oracle would have donated OpenOffice to Outercurve... I think it's kind of obvious that Oracle wanted it to go to the ASF and that other options weren't on the table. Now this could be implied as a Good Thing (a sort of olive branch towards Apache after the Java fiasco), or a Bad Thing (let those SOBs at Apache take all the heat), depending on one's world-view and mindset.
IMO, the "community" is much larger than "just" the LibreOffice community or the old OpenOffice community. The various versions and offshoots of OpenOffice are all part of this larger community, and so the question also assumes that "the community" is just LibreOffice itself, which I disagree with.
In all cases, IMO Outercurve would have handled it similarly to the way the ASF did: accept the code donation and welcome any and all comers with open arms. What would have happened after *that* is anyone's guess.