[Owncloud] github and contributor agreement

[Frank Karlitschek]

Hi everybody,
 
we had a lot of discussions about a potential move of ownCloud from gitorious to github in the past weeks.
One of the strong points for gitorious is that it´s free software and that we could take the code and host it ourselves if the service might go down someday. The plus points for github are that the service is faster and more reliable, github has more features and is developing fast so the feature difference to gitorious will probalby increase further and not shrink in the future. And the strongest reason, in my opinion, is that github seams to be the epicenter of the developer world at the moment. A lot of free software developers and free software projects are active there so it helps us collaborate with them if we are also there.
It´s indeed bad that github is not free software and we have to be careful to avoid a lock-in here. But I think the risk for us is manageable because we can always move our git repositories away to a self hosted git server, gitorious or something else if we don´t like github anymore. Git itself is open anyways. So I think that we don´t have a lock-in here and we should move to github.
 
I plan to do the move next weekend.
 
Repository split-up:
This is a good opportunity to finally split up our repositories as discussed in the mailing list for a long time.
So we will have an ownCloud core repository, a ownCloud 3rdparty repository and an ownCloud apps repository plus additional one like an app-playground, mirall and others.
 
 
Contributor agreement
All core people discussed and signed the contributor agreement already but now it a good opportunity to roll this out officially. We will require a contributor agreement from developers who want to commit to the core repository. The contributor agreement is very fair and better then similar agreements from other projects because it guarantees that ownCloud is always available under AGPL. All the main contributors signed it already so nothing changes for them.
This only applies to the core repository. We worked very hard and discussed this with a lot of people to find the most fair and open solution here. What we have now is an agreement that is similar to Qt with the Free Qt foundation so a guarantee that ownCloud is always available under the AGPL as it is today.
We have a FAQ that explains the reasons behind it. If someone has question please ask me :-)
 
The agreement is here: http://owncloud.org/documents/contributor-agreement.pdf
The FAQ is here: http://owncloud.org/documents/contributor-agreement-faq.pdf
 
 
bugs.owncloud.org
The performance of bugs.owncloud.org is not good. There is the option to move to the github issues tracker. But this only makes sense if we are able to migrate all the existing bugs over and if we are also able to export them again in the future if we don´t like github anymore. We don´t want to have a lock-in here. It would be great if someone would volunteer to evaluate this. And if this doesn´t work for us than have have to put some effort into thebuggenie to optimize it more. The current performance is not good enough if you ask me. :-)
 
 
Timeline:
- Please register an account on github now.
- Send me your username if you want to be in the committer group.
- Send me a signed scan of the agreement if you also want to commit to the core in the future.
- We will migrate the repositories next weekend. So please don't commit on Saturday until further notice :-)
 
 
Let´s do a Q/A session about this tonight on IRC.
I suggest to do it at 20:00 CET in the channel #owncloud. I hope this works for everybody.
 
 
Frank