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Process | The JA-SIG Incubation Process is holistically the activities and mechanism whereby open source software projects are proposed, incubated, evaluated, progressed, and become full-fledged JA-SIG sponsored projects |
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Incubation WG | The Incubation Working Group (Incubation WG) are the people who oversee this process. (Also known as IWG) |
Mentor | The Mentor is a particular person assigned by the Incubation Working Group to shepherd a candidate project through incubation |
Board | The JA-SIG Board leads JA-SIG, overseeing and supporting the Working Group and the process they execute |
Projects | Software to incubated, progressing from Candidate Project status through in-incubation Incubated Project status and ideally emerging as a fully-fledged Sponsored Project. |
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2. Review of Submission
The Incubation WG (and possibly the JA-SIG Board)
- Discuss the project
- Vote on its acceptability
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- Accept the project, which officially becomes a candidate project in incubation under the auspices of JA-SIG
- Nominate a Mentor for the project, typically a JA-SIG community stakeholder who will act as a bridge between the JIWG IWG and the project (mentor would also then serve as a member of the Incubation WGIWG)
- Assist the candidate project in the initial start-up to use the JA-SIG resources like SVN, Wiki, Issue Tracker, and mailing lists. These resources should be set up in JA_SIG unless IWG decides otherwise.
- Assist the candidate project in performing appropriate licensing, contribution, trademark, and other legal arrangements
The candidate project would should now also be free to:
- Indicate that the project is in incubation (though not yet fully sponsored/supported by JA-SIG)
- Display the JA-SIG logo to indicate affiliation
- Use JA-SIG infrastructure for development and collaboration unless an alternate infrastructure is agreed by IWG to be more appropriate.
Note: Releases of projects in incubation are not officially endorsed by JA-SIG
The minimum requirements that a project must meet to exit the state of incubation (and should be working on fulfilling as part of the incubation process) are:
Legal
These requirements are dependent on approval of a JA-SIG licensing policy.
- All code properly licensed
- No non-licensed or license-incompatible dependencies in the code base;
- Software license grant complete;
- Contributor License Agreements on file (both individual and corporate agreement);
- Copyright agreement in all source files
- Check of project name for trademark issues. JA-SIG will assist in trademark registration for project name.
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- A project steering committee has been created to oversee the project or the project committers and an existing steering commitee agree that an existing steering committee will steer the project.
- JA-SIG voting practices have been adopted and are standard practice
- The project can articulate instances of having has weathered and resolved conflictconflicts where they have arisen. Good-natured and well-meaning disagreement of vision, requirements, and implementation are a reality of community source development. JA-SIG desires that incubated projects work through these "growing pains", as the software is developed and additional committers and adopters become involved, before emerging from incubation. Incubation provides an opportunity to face conflict with the assistance of an Incubation Mentor and the support of the Incubation Working Group. [ JS: this seems too hard to quantify to be particularly useful ][SB: I think this is a good criteria for review in the case where there has been conflict. I don't think it's a requirement.]
- Release plans are developed and executed in public by the committers
- At least one release has occurred during the Incubation process.
- Engagement by the incubated community with the larger JA-SIG community. The incubated project may engage on a technical level by integrating with an existing JA-SIG projects. It is also desirable for the prospective project to have been presented / discussed at the JA-SIG Unconference or annual conference.
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- The project will be promoted into a fully sponsored JA-SIG project
- The project will remain in Incubation [SB: Is there a limit to the time in incubation?]Incubation
- The project will be asked to hibernate after a period of little activity (it may move out of hibernation at a later date)
- The project will be asked to retire due to lack of progress
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The project may be promoted to a fully sponsored JA-SIG project when it meets Legal, governance, community, alignment & synergy and Infrastructure requirements outlined above. When requirements are met the IWG will recommend to the board that the project be promoted to sponsored status. Final acceptance of sponsored project must be approved by the board.
Notes
A sandbox or "contrib." environment may also be made available to projects before entering a Candidate phase. This is a less formal status than Candidate. Projects in contrib. may be put there to share with the community and garner support and participation. Contrib projects may be nominated to enter incubation, at which point the formal incubator acceptance criteria would be applied. Projects may also be nominated to enter incubation from outside contrib, or during project formation. In other words, a presence in contrib is not a pre-requisite to becoming an incubation candidate, not is progress towards incubation necessary for contributions into the contrib area.