From: khaines@...
Date: 2007-01-04T01:47:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Who's maintaining log4r?

On Wed, 3 Jan 2007, Tom Copeland wrote:

> Hm.  I hear ya.  Maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick on this one.
> I'll chat with the RubyCentral guys (Rich/David/Chad) and see what they
> think.  RubyForge is owned by RubyCentral (they pay for hardware and
> bandwidth) so they've got the final say on any policy decision like
> this...

There are a few considerations here that seem to be the important ones.

1) The licensing terms on the project's code are going to influence what 
can be done, since open source doesn't mean public domain.  One can't go 
and _take away_ someone's ownership of the project.

2) A lot of those issues can probably be bypassed in most cases by simply 
adding someone to the project as a developer with commit privs, leaving 
the actual ownership of the project in place.

3) If a decision is made to allow projects that appear to have been 
abandoned, with an owner that can't be reached, to receive new committers 
without the consent of the project owner, I think it would be a very good 
idea to put the exact procedure for making that determination into writing 
on Rubyforge first.  It should be linked to when one creates a new 
project, so people are aware of the policy, and every single owner of an 
existing project should be emailed to let them know about the policy well 
ahead the time of first implementation.  That way project owners will have 
little justification for saying that they didn't know that the policy was 
there.


Just my $.03.


Kirk Haines