Lotus Awards For OpenNTF and GPL Submissions
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 1:41 PM
As you may have heard over on [Ed Brill's blog] and on the [OpenNTF blog] and even talked about in the [Taking Notes 100th Episode PodCast], IBM Lotus have added two new awards to the [Lotus Awards] ( formally Beacon Awards ) for this year. These are for the [best open source solution by an individual] and [best open source solution by a business partner].
The award is open to all OpenNTF projects members with a few minor exceptions where steering committee members are excluded from individual awards and IBM staff are excluded from both awards. The idea behind these exclusions are so that YOU have a chance to win, there have been a lot of great OpenNTF contributions by IBM staff over the past few months and it would not be great if IBM ended up awarding themselves, if you know what I mean.
So what's all this got to do with GPL, simple really. GPL projects on OpenNTF have the exact same chance of winning one of the two awards just as much as APL projects and I would like to encourage all GPL project owners to look at their projects and see if they can get them entered.
To enter a project in for the award, be it an APL or a GPL project, there are a couple of things you need to do first, you need to make sure that you have signed and sent in the ICLA or CCLA to the IP Manager and then you need to request that your project be reviewed for submission in the APl or GPL catalog.
If you are thinking of submitting your GPL project for the award and your getting it all ready for submission to the GPL catalog then I'd like to pass on a few hints to make the process as smooth as possible. As the GPL Commitor I will ultimately be reviewing the submission for the GPL catalog and here are just a few things that I'll be looking out for.
1. Make sure you have included the correct license file at the root level of the zip file that your NSF/NTF is stored in.
2. If you have used any third party code then make sure you include a NOTICES.TXT file in the root of the zip listing the code area and licenses for those bits of code.
3. If you have a lot of third party code then maybe a separate directory to hold all the third party licenses would be a good idea.
4. Documentation on how to install, configure and use the application is a must. It doesn't have to be fancy but it must exist.
One important thing to be aware of is the compatibility of licenses, GPL2 and GPL3 are very different. If you have third party GPL2 code in your project then you can't release your project under GPL3, you'll have to release it under GPL2 as technically your not authorised to release the third party code under a different license. License compatibility is something that we'll be looking at carefully.
I'm really looking forward to getting the first few GPL projects into the GPL catalog on OpenNTF and the Lotus Awards are a great way to encourage this. I'll be looking forward to the IP Manager sending me a list of projects that you have requests to be reviewed.
BTW, just so everybody knows, the Lotus Awards are judged by a panel of IBM staff and a panel of people from the industry press. The OpenNTF steering committee and member companies are not involved in the judging process in any way.
Good luck to everybody who enters.