Until recently, the “In Catalog” field in the Project and Release pages normally displayed “No”. This has now been fixed – at least for the individual project releases. So now you can tell, on a release by release basis, if it has gone through the IP verification process, and has had its documentation and functionality checked.

A picture named M2

The "In Catalog" field for projects is still bogus - and will eventually be removed - as the verification process is based on releases - not on projects.  

Companies that have processes that vet open source for internal use or for use within their products, should stick to OpenNTF code that is in the Catalog. Such code is more likely to meet their vetting requirements.  

A little background here. In 2009, we went through a process to bring some rigor to the OpenNTF. We wanted to provide a means where users could have some assurance that OpenNTF projects had been checked to ensure that the code was licensed in a manner that permitted them to use the code, did not have components with conflicting licenses, and was submitted by those who had authority to do so. But we didn't want to hobble the ability for contributors to post their submissions. So, after a couple of months of community discussions, we came up with an IP Policy with the following set of rules:

– All contributors have to be covered by a contribution agreement (based on the Apache contribution agreements).
– Contributions must be under either the Apache 2.0 software license, or one of the GPL3 family of licenses.  
– We would have 2 Catalogs, one for Apache-licensed projects, the other for GPL/LGPL/AGPL-licensed projects.  
– And of course the IP vetting process was established

We have moved slowly to enforce the policy – partly to ease the transition. First we established the Catalogs, and vetted many of the projects so that they could be placed into them. Second, the infrastructure was changed so that you could not post a release unless you were covered by a contribution agreement. And now we have made it easier to see if releases are in a Catalog.    

Over the next few months, more changes are coming to the OpenNTF project and release pages – including the ability to have private working areas for you and your team to work on a project. More on this in my next blog entry.  

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