FW: Release of code as-is/no-promises into the wild? (was) Re: Licensing of test tools acquired from WS-I

[Jacques Durand <JDurand@us.fujitsu.com>]

I take the liberty to forward some content from a response from Jamie about questions Micah and I had about OASIS hosting code (licensing, hosting, etc..) so that we can inform the discussion today. Jamie will send out something more complete in light of additional input from the conf call.
-jacques
------------- from Jamie B. Clark:
I will plan to attend the BRSP meeting tomorrow starting at 12:30 PT, in case there are questions.  I will post to that list, confirming this thread, after that, so that the posting possibly can be further informed by that conversation.

At first glance:
   -- On which license:  it has to be something that majorities of the community and our Board all will tolerate.  BSD wouldn't bother me a bit, but it's the community who has to decide this.

  -- On hosting code at OASIS:  personally I'd love to see that.  And certainly others including W3C do, and WS-I did.  For us, the immediate obstacles are:
    (a) we don't have a codeplex engine, nor an established choice for outsourcing it somewhere;
    (b) we don't have a governance rule for when and who may post; and
    (c) we don't have a software liability exculpation policy.
None of those are beyond our reach, if our members wish to enlighten our Board (some members of which previously have been reluctant).

  -- On "outsourcing" the code hosting.  Certainly can be done.  It's not like we need to install house servers to do this.  But every platform comes with its own license issues (e.g., "if you post this thing to Sourceforge you are hereby promising ..."), so it's not something we can do heedlessly.

  -- On "recognizing/endorsing" some external OSS tool for use:
raises the same IPR / playing favorites issues.

Note, our TCs have plenty of GitHub nodes, Sourceforge projects and (I
hear) even Reddit forks.  But they're all unofficial activity, generated by members on their own, thus not triggering any "official recognition" issues.

I'd love to see this set of issues sorted out, and more development enabled.  Looking forward to our chat tomorrow..

Cordially, JBC