[clug] Donating to FOSS. What do people do?

[Mike Carden]

> I'll cc myself at work so I remember to send you something tomorrow.

And now that I'm at work I find that all I have written is scattered
across a bunch of disparate emails and not collected nicely in one
place. Never mind, here's the essence of it.

It sounds like you have the mechanics sorted out, but we use
sourceforge.net for source code version control via git repositories,
for file releases, for mailing lists, wikis and web hosting.

One of the hard parts of doing open source properly is looking at any
libraries you pull in to your code and making sure that their
individual licenses play nicely with each other and with the license
that you decide to release under. We use around 100 libraries so
managing license compatibility is very important to us. Last year we
had to rip out a lot of code and either replace it with compatibly
licensed equivalents or in a few sad cases, write something ourselves.
We also ended up having to change our license.

As for governance, all commits to the sourceforge git repositories are
done by a small number of our staff. This isn't really a policy
decision, it's just that nobody else has ever shown any interest in
wanting to be a committer. Project direction is determined by the
technical lead (i.e.me) and informed by the sourceforge bug and
enhancement trackers.

Take a look if you're interested. Our various pieces of software fall
under the umbrella of the Digital Preservation Software Platform:
http://dpsp.sourceforge.net

-- 
MC