An Update On My Involvement With OpenNTF

If you follow my blog you’ll know I have
been very vocal about the changes that OpenNTF announced a while back.
 One of my biggest areas of concern was that OpenNTF was moving towards
only supporting the Apache Public License which would, in my opinion, leave
a lot of open source developers with nowhere to go if they wanted to create
and release projects that used any other open source license.

Thankfully, after much discussion, the
IP Working group put together a set of proposals that would give GPL and
similarly licensed projects an equal place alongside the APL projects on
OpenNTF. When presented to the OpenNTF Steering Committee the proposals
were accepted by the majority of the members and in the past few weeks
on OpenNTF the catalog link has changed to ‘Downloads’ and you’ll now see
the ‘GPL Catalog’ listed in there.

The GPL Catalog is currently empty because,
until last week, there has not been anybody in the role of GPL Committer.
This has now changed and I am pleased to announce that I have volunteered
to take on this role. As the person who made the most noise about supporting
GPL and similar licenses I decided that taking on this role would be one
way to show my appreciation of all that OpenNTF has done in the past for
open source projects of all licenses and also show that I’m not ‘all talk
and no action’ but that I stand by my conviction that all Open Source licenses
need to be treated equally on OpenNTF.

So if you have any OpenNTF projects
that fall under the GPL/LGPL license and you’d like to get a release made
for the new GPL Catalog on OpenNTF then keep any eye out for the procedures
that will be announced very soon. I’d like to try and get a few of the
bigger GPL licensed projects on OpenNTF into the catalog as soon as possible
and I’m looking for a second person to assist as a GPL Committer ( mainly
because I can’t commit my own GPL projects ).

I was going to title this post "OpenNTF
: I Tried, You Failed, You Fixed Some Issues, I’m trying again."