[License-review] Fwd: [Non-DoD Source] Resolution on NOSA 2.0

[Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US)]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: License-review [mailto:license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org] On Behalf Of Rick Moen
> Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2018 8:20 PM
> To: license-review at lists.opensource.org
> Subject: Re: [License-review] Fwd: [Non-DoD Source] Resolution on NOSA 2.0
> 
> Quoting Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US) (cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil):
> 
> > Actually, I have a slightly different idea; Bryan or Rob, would you be
> > willing to post the complete text on GitHub somewhere?  One of the
> > parallel conversations that has been happening is the use of new tools
> > to comment on and evaluate licenses; NOSA 2.0 could be the guinea pig
> > for the idea of using GitHub to do that.  If nothing else, we can
> > maintain a log of all the issues and comments in one place, so that
> > when we all forget what we were arguing over 5 years ago, we can look
> > up the issues quickly and see if anything has changed since.
> 
> Just a note in passing:  If participation in OSI public outreach begins to require login accounts at -- and thus contractual agreements
> with -- external firms such as GitHub, Inc., OSI will lose some participants.
> 
> I long ago started saying 'no' when some community institutions started expecting members to sign up for outsourced Internet
> services just to talk to the community institutions, e.g., when my fellow Board of Directors members at BayLISA, my local professional
> sysadmin guild, persisted in expecting everyone including Directors and meeting attendees to coordinate with them via Meetup
> because the Board majority had become too lazy to operate their own Web site and Mailman lists, I quietly served out the last of my
> approximately six terms of office and dropped out of both the Board and the group.[1]
> 
> OSI management should please note that people who decline to participate in similar arrangements, because they're disinclined to
> sign up for yet another third-party outsourcing agreement, probably won't tell OSI that.
> They'll just be invisibly and quietly absent.
> 
> [1] More at Caution-http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/meetup.html
> 
> --
> Cheers,
> Rick Moen             "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
> rick at linuxmafia.com                               -- Stephen Dedalus, _Ulysses_
> McQ! (4x80)

That's an interesting point, and one that I hadn't considered; I was only thinking that if we were going to the trouble of selecting tools, then we should test them experimentally.  But your point is a good one.

And I just thought of another point;  OSI is a fairly long-lived organization, and is definitely older than Git*.  if Git* goes under, what happens to the issues, etc. on Git* servers? The git repositories would be reasonably safe due to everyone pulling from them continuously, but there is a lot of other metadata that could be lost.  It would be better to have everything under git (or other DVCS) so that there are enough copies around the net that if one person or organization dies/goes down/whatever, then the rest of the network can recover and rebuild.  

Alternatively, we could explore Fossil (https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki) or Veracity (http://veracity-scm.com/downloads.html), or something similar that has bug tracking & wiki built in; I have no experience with either, so if anyone on here knows anything about either (or about some better system) please speak up!

Thanks,
Cem Karan