[Zope-Annce] Zwiki contributor policy update

Simon Michael simon at joyful.com
Sun Dec 11 11:03:52 EST 2005


Hi all!

I'm slightly burned out and bored with certain areas of Zope 2 Zwiki 
development. I think the product will provide some value for a while 
yet, and it's not too late to shake things up and make a bigger splash. 
If we don't do this during the period of Zwiki & Zope 2's relevance, our 
good work will bring less benefit than it might have. So I'm putting out 
a call for help. I'd really like to see more people take on development 
of Zwiki.

What are the roadblocks - of my making, and otherwise - to a more active 
Zwiki developer community ? For one thing I needed to nail down some 
copyright/license issues more explicitly, to make contributing and 
accepting contributions more of a no-brainer. Here's my latest thinking:

LICENSE

Much Zope code uses the ZPL. We want to maximize code sharing and 
participation with the whole Zope community. Much of the rest of the 
FOSS world uses the GPL, and the same goes for them. Dual GPL/ZPL 
licensing may seem a good option, but I'm convinced it's not worth the 
added complexity, legal uncertainty and fragmentation; either straight 
GPL or straight ZPL is preferable. GPL is the mainstream license for the 
future IMHO, I think it's still the best option, and I have no plan to 
leave it. Also I think we should adopt GPLv3? 
<http://zwiki.org/PolicyAnnouncementDraft/createform?page=GPLv3> when 
it's ready. That said, there's now clear policy allowing non-GPL code to 
be added to Zwiki if necessary (below). Also I remain open to license 
exemption requests from Zope developers.

COPYRIGHT

I no longer think the single copyright holder policy is best for this 
project, and I'm going to drop it. I am changing the main repo's policy 
to multiple copyright holders (& allowing multiple licenses), with the 
simple condition that the overall project manager is assigned the right 
to relicense to newer license versions. The powerful darcs revision 
control system (together with new CONTRIBUTORS list) should help us to 
keep track of copyright & licensing status and even remove problematic 
commits later if needed.

CONTRIBUTOR'S AGREEMENT

To ensure that everyone gets proper credit for their work; a clear audit 
trail and legal status for the project; and that the project can remain 
license-compatible with other free & open-source software in future, I 
have added a very simple contributor agreement/contributor list: 
http://zwiki.org/repos/ZWiki/CONTRIBUTORS.txt . All Zwiki contributors 
should read and consider signing this file, to help us meet these goals. 
You can follow this easy procedure to add your name to the glorious list:

 (install darcs if needed, see http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/CategoryBinaries)
 darcs get --partial http://zwiki.org/repos/ZWiki
 cd ZWiki
 echo "- Your Name <your at email>" >>CONTRIBUTORS.txt
 darcs record -a -m"signed it" CONTRIBUTORS.txt
 (enter your name & email address again)
 darcs send 

This will become the authoritative list of code committers (at least), 
and I'll be working to make sure all of you are listed properly. Many 
have donated their time and creativity over the years - this list will 
make that clearer.

All comments, help and other ideas welcome. And I hope to see some of 
you online or off. Happy holidays, and thanks

-Simon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-announce/attachments/20051211/4f020c71/attachment.htm


More information about the Zope-Announce mailing list