IBM has planned to contribute on Monday 10/12/09 the following eight templates to OpenNTF under the Apache license 2 (ALv2):

- Mail
- Personal Address Book
- Teamroom
- Domino Blog
- Notebook
- Widget Catalog
- Eclipse Update Site
- Doc Library

These templates are the same versions as in Notes/Domino 8.5.1 with the only differences that they will be available under ALv2 and signed with another id.

The main purpose is to allow the Notes/Domino application development community to extend these templates with value added solutions or to reuse parts of these templates in custom applications. The Apache license defines the legal foundation to allow this.

In addition to this one time contribution IBM is evaluating whether future versions of these templates can be contributed as well to allow the community to update their future solutions based on these templates with future template versions.

The eight templates are the English versions of the templates. Once the internationalized templates will be available, the Notes/Domino community can request open source versions of other languages.

For these eight templates IBM has no concrete plans to take extensions by the community back into the product. Contributions to these eight OpenNTF projects will not be allowed. Instead developers can create their own projects where they extend the templates. However with the new OpenNTF Alliance IP (intellectual property) model based on ALv2, IBM, as well as any other company, has the right to take community contributions back to blend with future releases.

The releases can be downloaded from OpenNTF but defects tracking and support questions on the unchanged templates will not be handled via the OpenNTF project infrastructure. Instead consumers are asked to follow the usual IBM processes (e.g. PMR, IBM support, etc.). Also the Apache license doesn't change IBM's positioning on handling of undocumented APIs (e.g. see Technote 1101582).

These templates are planned to be made available as open source in addition to the discussion template which has already been communicated earlier. In difference to the eight templates above however the goal is to extend the discussion template via the OpenNTF community.

All statements regarding IBM's plans, directions, and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice.


comments powered byDisqus