Changes to Intel contribution model

Changes to Intel contribution model

[Doran, Mark]

Hi Everyone:

The way Intel's BIOS development community is organized has changed recently.  This change presents opportunities to rethink some of the ways that we interact with the open source community around BIOS and this project in particular.  In general, I believe Intel is interested in moving towards a more mainstream open source project model of interaction with this community.

As a first step in that process, I'd like to let you know that Intel will shortly change the licensing for all our EDK II project contributions.  The existing license, composed of Contributor Agreement and BSD terms, will remain.  However we will be adding Apache 2.0 terms as a dual license option for all contributions that we have made wherever practical to do so.

In practice, these two license formulations are effectively equivalent for both contributors and consumers of code from the project.  The value in making this change is that it means the affected code will be licensed with an OSI approved set of license terms.  This should among other things make it easier for participants to get approval to work and contribute in the project and will allow us to get rid of the hurdle of a formal agreement to the Contributor terms as a precursor to doing any work.

Longer term, I'd like to invite all contributors to consider doing something similar with their contributions.  And beyond that, perhaps taking the lead of other projects like OpenSSL that have done this, converge on Apache 2.0 as the single, preferred license for the code in the project.  That of course is a decision for the community rather than any one participant.

With the latter thought in mind, I'd also like to invite discussion of what changes might be made to the project to make it function and present as a more recognizable mainstream open source project.  I think the changes at Intel create an opportunity for us to take on board community feedback, much of which we have heard but heretofore not necessarily been able to enact.  In other words we are at a point where Intel is willing to make substantive changes to its working model with the project but we would like to engage the community to decide together what a better, stronger upstream project could look like going forward.

I've talked to some of you about these ideas and the proposal right now would be to set up some open phone meeting conversations about what aspirations we might collectively agree for the project.  I think we will need more than one to accommodate schedules and time zones since we have a pretty well spread out group of participants.  Watch for logistics proposals on when those conversations can take place.  Ideally I'd like to try and get those rolling within the next week or two at most.  I'd ask everyone to think about things you'd like to see done differently in the EDK II project, be it tree changes, tools and process changes, actual code changes or anything else and be ready to bring those forward for discussion.  I did talk to the stewards already and I know they have a few ideas along these lines already so there's already some seeds for the discussion there.

Since this is not exactly a normal thread of discussion for this mailing list, I'd suggest that we not initially engage in extensive discussion on this via the email reflector - rather let's find those times to talk about ideas in real time by phone meeting as I think that will be more efficient to share brainstorming ideas. And I don't want to disrupt the work flow here in the meanwhile! (well, not any more than I just did perhaps ;))

If you have questions about the above that can't wait for the broader inclusive discussions, you are welcome to reply to me direct of course.  I'm really looking forward to conversations about how to make a better upstream that will benefit our entire ecosystem!
--
Cheers,

Mark.