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Benjamin Kaduk 2016-01-15 05:09:27 +00:00
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</task>
</help>
</project>
<project cat='team'>
<title>The &os; Core Team</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>&os; Core Team</name>
<email>core@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Two major concerns have occupied much of core's attention
during the last quarter: the reorganisation of the Security
Team and the question of whether to import GPLv3 licensed code
into the source repository.</p>
<p>The Security Team reorganisation, first proposed to Core
during a meeting at BSDCan this year by Gleb Smirnoff &mdash; core
member and newly-appointed deputy Security Officer &mdash; has now
been accomplished. In order to improve the project's
responsiveness to security alerts, to maintain security on
privileged information received in confidence before general
publication and, not least, to reduce the work load on the
security officer, the role of the SO team has been redefined as
the controller of the distribution of security sensitive
information within the project; they are responsible for
interfacing with external bodies and individuals reporting
security problems, and connecting them with appropriate
individuals within the project with the technical expertise to
address the identified concerns. The SO team was cut down to just
the Security Officer and his deputy, assisted by a secretary, and
with input and help in drafting security advisories from former
and any potential future Security Officers plus liasons with Core,
Cluster Administration and Release Engineering.</p>
<p>Core would particularly like to thank the former members of
the Security Team group for their past contributions, now that
the Security Team role has been merged into the Security
Officer's responsibilities.</p>
<p>The other large question concerning Core is how to provide a
modern toolchain for all supported achitectures. Tier 1
architectures are required to ship with a toolchain
unencumbered by onerous license terms. This is currently
provided for i386 and arm64 by the LLVM suite, including the
Clang compiler, LLD and LLDB. However LLVM support for other
(Tier 2 or below) architectures is not yet of sufficient quality
to be viable, and the older but pre-existing GPLv2 toolchain
cannot support some of the interesting new architectures such
as arm64 and RISC V. Pragmatically, in order for the project
to support these, until LLVM support arrives we must turn to the
GNU project's GPLv3 licenced toolchain.</p>
<p>The argument here is whether to import GPLv3 licensed code
into the &os; src repository with all of the obligations on
patent terms and source code redistribution that would entail,
not only for the &os; project itself but for numerous
downstream consumers of &os; code. Not having a toolchain
readily available is a big impediment to working on a new
architecture.</p>
<p>One potential solution is to create a range of &quot;GPLv3
toolchain&quot; base-system packages out of a completely separate
source code repository, for instance within the &os; area on
Github. These would be distributed equivalently to the other
base system binary packages when that mechanism is
introduced.</p>
<p>Core recognises that this is a decision with wide-ranging
consequences and will be producing a position paper for
circulation amongst all interested parties in order to judge
community opinion on the matter. Core welcomes feedback from
all interested parties on the subject.</p>
<p>Beyond these two big questions, Core has handled a number of
lesser items:</p>
<ul>
<li>Core approved the formation of a wiki-admin team to take
over managing the Wiki, to curate the Wiki content and work
on navigation and organization of existing technical content
and to evaluate new Wiki software with the aim of opening up
the Wiki to contributions from the public.</li>
<li>An external review board has been assembled to look at
the Code of Conduct, including a mixture of project members
and experts from external groups. The review process is
getting under way and Core is awaiting their report.</li>
<li>The standard documentation license was found to be
unfit for its purpose, and the doceng group had temporarily
reverted to the previous license while a new replacement was
drafted. This new license is now the default for new
documentation submissions. However, one factor emerging from
this review was the difficulty of maintaining correct
authorial attributions for sections of documentation, some of
which may only be a few words long. Unlike source code,
blocks of documentation are frequently moved around within
individual files, or even between files. Consequently Core
would like to introduce a &quot;Voluntary Contribution
Agreement&quot; along the lines of the one operated
by the Apache Foundation. With this, copyrights are signed
over to the &os; Foundation, with individual contributions
being recognised by recording names in a general
&quot;Authors&quot; file. This will be another alternative
alongside the existing copyright mechanisms used in the
project. Core is interested to hear any opinions on the
subject.</li>
<li>Core approved the formation of a new
&quot;dev-announce&quot; mailing list, which all &os; committers
should be members of. This will be a low-traffic moderated list
to contain important announcements, heads-ups, warnings of code
freezes, changes in policy and notifications of events that
affect the project as a whole.</li>
<li>Around eight years ago, an attempt was made to import the
OpenBSD sensors framework. This was rejected at the time as
potentially blocking the development of a better designed
framework. However, no such development has occurred in the
intervening time whilst the sensors framework has been in
use successfully by both OpenBSD and FreeNAS. Despite some
concerns about the efficiency of the framework and potential
impacts on power consumption and hence battery lifetime, core
is minded to approve the import, but wants to consult with
interested developers first.</li>
<li>Core is exploring the legal ramifications for the project
of the &quot;Right to Be Forgotten&quot; established by
the European Court of Justice.</li>
<li>Core is also seeking an alternative means for holding
their regular monthly conference calls. The current,
paid-for, service has less than satisfactory sound quality
and reliability, and Core would like to switch to a free
video conferencing solution.</li>
</ul>
<p>This quarter also saw a particularly large influx of new
commit bit requests, with on occasion, four votes running
simultaneously. Please welcome Kurt Lidl, Svatopluk Kraus,
Michal Meloun, Jonathan Looney (Juniper), Daisuke Aoyama, Phil
Shafer (Juniper), Ravi Pokala (Panasas), Anish Gupta and Mark
Bloch (Mellanox) to the ranks of src committers. In addition,
core was delighted to restore commit privileges for Eric
Melville after a hiatus of many years.</p>
<p>No commit bits were taken in during the quarter. A
non-committer account was approved for Kevin Bowling of
LimeLight Networks. Kevin will be doing systems administration
work with clusteradm with particular interest in the parts of
the cluster that are now hosted in LLNW's facilities. Deb
Goodkin of the &os; Foundation was added to the developers
mailing list: she was one of the few members of the Foundation
Board not already on the list, and having awareness of what is
going on in the developer community will help her to support
the project more effectively.</p>
</body>
</project>
</report>