The Project SocialSite development community would like to become an Apache project to gain the governance and diversity needed to survive and thrive as a viable open source project. This document covers the background, rational, goals, status and risk involved in incubating the project.
Project SocialSite is an open source (CDDL/GPLv2) Social Networking Service based on Apache Shindig (incubating). The software is not simply a "canned" Social Network or Facebook-in-a-box type of web application; it's something different. Project SocialSite is designed to add social networking features to existing web applications and web sites. Project SocialSite is made up of two parts: 1) a social data server that supports the OpenSocial APIs and extensions and 2) a set of OpenSocial gadgets that provide a complete user-interface for social networking.
Project SocialSite was developed internally by Sun Microsystems and released as open source under a dual CDDL/GPLv2 license in September 2008. Sun discontinued the project in January 2009, but development of the code-base has continued without salaried developers and the community has expressed interest in continuing as a project, so long as a level playing field can be established for contributors. To provide the governance needed to grow a viable and diverse development community, the Project SocialSite community would like to become an Apache project. Recently, Sun agreed to contribute the code base to the Apache Software Foundation to make this possible.
The initial goals of the project are to build an active community, learn to operate as an Apache project, keep in sync with the evolving OpenSocial specifications and with the Apache Shindig (incubating) project and continue to improve performance and usability.
This section covers the current status of Project SocialSite.
Project SocialSite has been run under the Glassfish rules of governance, which dictate consensus-based decision making and some level of meritocracy. The community members are familiar with the Apache way and ready to work in an Apache-style meritocracy.
The Project SocialSite community is relatively small, but some members are already usiing Project SocialSite in production. They are already working together by participating in mailing lists, contributing code and submitting issues and patches.
Project SocialSite was originally developed by employees of Sun Microsystems, but the community membership is no longer dominated by Sun.
Well aligned with Apache in terms of technologies and licensing. The code-base makes extensive use of Apache technologies including Commons, Struts, Ant and Shindig. The community is happy with changing the license terms and Sun, the copyright holder, is willing to make the necessary code contribution.
This section covers the risks that the project will face as it progresses through incubation.
Risk level: moderate to high. Project SocialSite is definitely an orphaned product, but this is mitigated by the facts that 1) development has continued after project cancellation and 2) members of the community intent to use the code in production on major sites. There is some risk that community members will not be able to commit the time necessary to build community and code necessary to achieve project status.
Risk level: low. All of the community members have experience with open source and several have extensive experience with Apache.
Risk level: low. The community is diverse and made up of developers from different organizations.
Risk level: moderate. The community includes members who are paid to work on the code and some who are not.
Risk level: low to moderate. Project SocialSite is based on Apache products, but the most important of these products is still incubating (Shindig).
Risk level: low. The Project SocialSite community wants to become an Apache project to gain the governance and level playing field needed for viability, not any sort of marketing advantage.
This section covers the details of the source code submission and code-base dependencies.
The initial source will come from the Subversion repository at Project SocialSite's Java.net based site.
https://socialsite.dev.java.net/svn/socialsite
The plan is to 1) have Sun submit a the code grant paper work and 2) copy the code from Project SocialSite's trunk to the Apache Incubator's Subversion repository. Once that is done we will set about replacing license headers and changing names from Project SocialSite to Apache SocialSite and changing the package names from com.sun.socialsite to org.apache.socialsite.
The Project SocialSite codebase has the following runtime dependencies:
And the following build-time dependencies:
Same Cryptography dependencies as Apache Shindig (incubating)
This section outlines the resources that the project will require.
Requirement: One Subversion repository. Should be named "socialsite"
Requirement: One issue tracking system, JIRA prefered
Affiliations are listed in section 9.0.
We propose that Apache SocialSite be sponsored by the Incubator itself.
Apache Incubator