Lotus Awards For OpenNTF and GPL Submissions

As you may have heard over on Ed Brill’s blog
and on the OpenNTF blog
and even talked about in the Taking
Notes 100th Episode PodCast, IBM Lotus have added two new awards
to the Lotus Awards
( formally Beacon Awards ) for this year. These are for the best
open source solution by an individual and best
open source solution by a business partner.

The award is open to all OpenNTF projects
members with a few minor exceptions where steering committee members are
excluded from individual awards and IBM staff are excluded from both awards.
The idea behind these exclusions are so that YOU have a chance to win,
there have been a lot of great OpenNTF contributions by IBM staff over
the past few months and it would not be great if IBM ended up awarding
themselves, if you know what I mean.

So what’s all this got to do with GPL,
simple really. GPL projects on OpenNTF have the exact same chance of winning
one of the two awards just as much as APL projects and I would like to
encourage all GPL project owners to look at their projects and see if they
can get them entered.

To enter a project in for the award,
be it an APL or a GPL project, there are a couple of things you need to
do first, you need to make sure that you have signed and sent in the ICLA
or CCLA to the IP Manager and then you need to request that your project
be reviewed for submission in the APl or GPL catalog.

If you are thinking of submitting your
GPL project for the award and your getting it all ready for submission
to the GPL catalog then I’d like to pass on a few hints to make the process
as smooth as possible. As the GPL Commitor I will ultimately be reviewing
the submission for the GPL catalog and here are just a few things that
I’ll be looking out for.

1. Make sure you have included the correct
license file at the root level of the zip file that your NSF/NTF is stored
in.

2. If you have used any third party
code then make sure you include a NOTICES.TXT file in the root of the zip
listing the code area and licenses for those bits of code.

3. If you have a lot of third party
code then maybe a separate directory to hold all the third party licenses
would be a good idea.

4. Documentation on how to install,
configure and use the application is a must. It doesn’t have to be fancy
but it must exist.

One important thing to be aware of is
the compatibility of licenses, GPL2 and GPL3 are very different. If you
have third party GPL2 code in your project then you can’t release your
project under GPL3, you’ll have to release it under GPL2 as technically
your not authorised to release the third party code under a different license.
License compatibility is something that we’ll be looking at carefully.

I’m really looking forward to getting
the first few GPL projects into the GPL catalog on OpenNTF and the Lotus
Awards are a great way to encourage this. I’ll be looking forward to the
IP Manager sending me a list of projects that you have requests to be reviewed.

BTW, just so everybody knows, the Lotus
Awards are judged by a panel of IBM staff and a panel of people from the
industry press. The OpenNTF steering committee and member companies are
not involved in the judging process in any way.

Good luck to everybody who enters.