[License-review] moving to an issue tracker [was Re: Some notes for license submitters]

[Allison Randal]

I don't know if anyone recalls, but we did set up issue tracking for
License Review on Taiga.io two years ago (which is AGPL). It was never
really used. So, while I'm entirely in favor of issue tracking for
License Review, please also remember that it isn't a magic bullet,
people have to use it for it to make any difference.

I talked to John Sullivan about the software used for the GPLv3 review
process a few years ago, and he said it was ancient and unmaintained,
and recommended against using it for any current license review process.
(He said the work to make it usable today would be far worse than the
work to rewrite something new from scratch.)

We could probably make GitLab or GitHub work, though it wouldn't be
ideal. Agreed with Josh that we'd only need one project, and can handle
the licenses as files in directories. One thing I've seen work well for
this kind of process is to have an "review" directory and an "approved"
directory, so that licenses in draft can go through multiple revisions
with clear diffs between each revision, and then the final PR to
"approve" the license just changes the directory. The comments on
licenses in review can also be comments on PRs. If that isn't adequate,
we could supplement it with a wiki comment page for each license.

Maybe people will use this one. :)

Allison

On 06/19/2018 12:19 PM, Smith, McCoy wrote:
> FWIW, the GPLv3 revision process used stet
> (https://github.com/greenrd/stet), which is licensed AGPL with an
> exception.  I thought that tool was decent for allowing a wide number of
> inputs, linked to particular text sections.  It looks a lot like the
> comment bubbles you see in LibreOffice/OpenOffice (and Microsoft Word),
> with – IIRC – a “heat map” type feature to indicate areas of text that
> are receiving the most commentary.  That was 10+ years ago, and the tool
> might be improved from the way it functioned back then.
> 
>  
> 
> Richard Fontana can probably comment as to whether he thought it was
> effective from the receiving end.
> 
>  
> 
> I do think there is a need for some other mechanism to gather commentary
> rather than the mailing list and archives.  In response to recent
> questions raised about the process, I was trying to see the state of the
> various licenses still awaiting a final decision, and what issues seemed
> to still be unresolved, and it’s hard to decipher (particularly for
> NOSA, which has lots of commentary over a long period of time).
> 
>  
> 
> *From:* License-review
> [mailto:license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org] *On Behalf Of
> *Bruce Perens
> *Sent:* Tuesday, June 19, 2018 11:39 AM
> *To:* License submissions for OSI review
> <license-review at lists.opensource.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [License-review] moving to an issue tracker [was Re: Some
> notes for license submitters]
> 
>  
> 
> My preference would be for OSI to use open source tools. It's a
> credibility thing. We talk the talk, we should walk the walk. For some
> reason OSI internal business is using G Suite, and someone's using
> GitHub? As far as I'm aware, these things aren't entirely open source.
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> License-review mailing list
> License-review at lists.opensource.org
> http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-review_lists.opensource.org
>