2024-12-16 Meeting notes

Reminder:  Please copy/paste the Zoom chat into the notes.  If you miss it, this is saved along with the meeting recording, but having it here has benefits.

Maccabee Levine

Tod Olson

Jakub Skoczen

Craig McNally

Jenn Colt 

• CC: Maccabee Levine: 
  • CC approved projected FY25 budget. Single-year budget over by about $100k, but lots of carryover from prior years to break even without dipping into reserves. AWS budget $130k more than FY24, but expected to go down again FY26, specifics TBD.  No decisions yet on future of dev advocate (FY25 or FY26) timing but CC reiterated past support.
  • Budget yet O.K. Release Management Stakeholders (RMS) group, a call for broader participation. Stephen Pampell joined.
    
  • Stephen Pampell (TAMU) joining RMSG.
• PC: Tod Olson
  • Trying to get a decision in 2 weeks, but probably not before the New Year. ... PC re-meets this Thursday.
• RMS Group: Jakub Skoczen:
  • Nothing to follow up.
• Security Team: Craig McNally:
  • Reminder to please review Proposal for a Deprecation Policy for FOLIO Modules outside of the official supported set with a Severe Security Vulnerability and provide feedback.
  • Nothing else to mention here.
• Tri-council Application Formalization/Eureka:   Jenn Colt
  • Eureka was discussed in Wednesday meeting. This Wednesday it will be the topic again.

• 18 Dec 2024 - Eureka adoption
• 23 Dec 2024 - Regular TC meeting (Probably Cancel?)
• 25 Dec 2024 -  Cancel
• 30 Dec 2024 - Regular TC meeting (Probably Cancel?)
• 01.01. Cancel
• 06 Jan 2025 - Regular TC
• 08.01.2025 (Wednesday) (Possible topics:  Developer advocate retro, Voting rules)

• https://github.com/folio-org/tech-council/pulls

Julian Ladisch: All TC members should review these pull requests

Marc Johnson: This is unusual, subgroups were used before, but if this is the way we should update documentation is OK.

Maccabee Levine: very good and helpful PRs. Some need discussion, a wednesday would be great. Or a subgroup.

TC members should take a look at the PRs before.

Fast overview:

Needs discussion:

• PR75
• PR86
• PR73 - there has been some discussion, subgroup did not agree
• PR79

Merged:

• PR71

Easy ones should be resolvable on next monday, others need a discussion next year.

Today:

folio-org/tech-council PR #86

- merge pull requests as a group, communicate them as a group

- merge them all in one unit. (the evaluation criteria)

- Julian, Maccabee and Kevin will sort it out

folio-org/tech-council PR 85

- it is just fixing a link. Craig adds a label "READY TO MERGE"

PR #68 Document New Jira Statuses

- it reflects updating the documentation

- Jenn: it is waiting on a diagram upgrade. Jenn will look at that.

PR #79 Use ASF 3rd Party License Policy for module Evaluation

- it is about giving a list about licenses and not allowed licenses

- lawyers have evaluated this. If we accept it, we are on the safe side.

- Maccabee: that is a good suggestion. It is also a Policy on how to treat things in the list. There are suggestions in the license's Readme. FOLIO should adapt those suggestions.

- it is one or two lines at the bottom of the Readme.

- Julian: this is for new modules. Existing modules are out of scope here.

- we want to highlight these changes with dev teams.

- Tod: I am getting confused about the directionality of the GPL and no-GPL requirements. I wonder if we are exposing ourselves by distributing the library. Are there mechanisms not to distribute the library ? I am thinking of marc4j. The concerns is license incompatibility.

- Craig: There is no way to not distribute them.

- Marc J.: We distribute JARs and docker images, so we can't avoid distributing the libraries.

Marc J.: The exemptions of these libraries surprise me a little. But if these lists are "Apache-lawyer" approved - wonderful.  It just surprises me. … they seem to be magically compatible to a non-GPL License.

- Tod: My reading of the LPGL-3 license makes me think that what we are doing should be fine. The Apache Foundation might not distribute it. - I agree with Marc J. on the surprise.

- Some of us probably thought we were non-legally including these libraries.

- Craig: It clearly states that they may not be distributed with an Apache License.

- Marc J.: What is the Point of Change in this PR, then ? To explicitely acknowledge that we are doing something which we should not be doing ?

- Julian: Apache does not want to allow LGPL libraries. For FOLIO is is different. Our own source code is Apache licensed but we may use some Tools that have copy-left libraries. Therefore, we can use LGPL libraries. We can not use GPL libraries.

- Marc J. Now I am confused. I though we were compatible with the Apache License. But we are saying: "OK, we can break our rules in our own way". What is "an Apache foundation Apache License vs. a non-Apache foundation Apache License" ? I do not understand what we gain. We make our License explicit, but we may not be compliant with out licenses at the moment.

- Kevin Day: LGPL is more the ASF's opinion of what they want to achive in their Projects, and not so much the License itself.

- Tod: That is also my opinion. At the License Level, we can in fact distribute LGPL libraries.

- These exemptions were framed, because we need them. The criterion can be changed as soon as other (library licenses) have been proposed.

- Marc J. I am missing something (or not getting it). Either we are on safe Ground or, at the very least, we should be very clear about what we are complying with and what not. My understanding is that the licenses are incompatible because of the copyleft part.

- Craig / Julian. We generally comply, but with a couple of exceptions.

- Julian: I do not want the evaluators to have to do a legal Research.

- Marc J.: We are saying: Here is a list, we are making a couple of exceptions to ASF 3rd Party License Policy. That underpins that LGPL would be perfectly to include.

Jenn: When you include LGPL, it infects the Project. The ASF does not want this. We could make two exceptions and are not doing anything weird. We will meet the License requirements for those exceptions.

- Tod: The relevant portion of LGPL-3 is … my plain reading is that distributiong marc4j, you can not put a restriction of reverse engineering marc4j. For our understood Use of FOLIO that is not a likely Thing.

- Craig: LGPL aligns much with FOLIO with a few exceptions.

All

• ...

Nothing new

Check Recurring Calendar...

Craig McNally Jenn Colt clean up OST and calendar

................

We need to incorporate Go and then update the Calendar as well. Update the next instance in the calendar.

FYI:  While updating Technical Council Membership History we realized that one of the seats which was recently filled (Taras') has a term which ends next summer.  The other seat's (Jason's) term is good until summer `26.  This was an oversight.  Fortunately, Joshua Greben has graciously volunteered to take the shorter term, which allows us to maintain the balance of roughly half of the TC seats being up for grabs in a given election cycle.  Thank you for being flexible Joshua!

Taras' seat ends next summer.

Jason's seat ends one year later.

Joshua took the shorter term.

Kevin took Taras' spot.

• See proposals: Voting Rule Comparisons
• Jenn Colt added a feature comparison table
• Ingolf Kuss: calling a vote can be dangerous if there are only 6 or 7 members which hinders people from casting a vote.
• Marc Johnson: do we want to have a good decision or a fast decision
• Jenn Colt: we have no rules for bringing up a vote again or spamming the agenda. We do not need bad or slow decisions, but we need clear rules
• Marc Johnson: differences when a motion is not carried
• Florian Gleixner: re-voting on the same topic should not be allowed without changing content

Sie an Alle 17:18
where exactly does this go in the protcol ? Is this a new line in "Discussion items" (the Pull Requests)

Julian Ladisch an Alle 17:20
Should go into the row "TCR documentation change PRs"

Jenn Colt an Alle 17:39
yes

Julian Ladisch an Alle 17:40
Using GPL library in a module -> the complete module must be licenced under GPL.
Using LGPL library in a module -> the module can have some other license but requires to allow people to replace the LGPL library. Apache foundation don't want this requirement.

Jenn Colt an Alle 17:45
The PR is for convenience, the exemption is also for convenience

Julian Ladisch an Alle 17:49
The PR provides an allow list, the evaluator should not do any legal research.

Marc Johnson 17:53
My understanding was LGPL did not allow distribution within a non-copy left license (which Apache is)

Marc Johnson 17:54
I was on about pre-3 versions of LGPL

Julian Ladisch 17:58
GPL does not allow distribution under Apache license, LGPL does.

Review decisions that are in progress.  Can any of them be accepted?  rejected?

Currently there is a PoC, developed by Maccabee Levine, of a utility to catalog Github PRs that have been labeled with the "breaking change" label. We would like to get developer feedback on the feasibility of this label being used more often, and the usefulness of this utility. 

Previous Notes:

• A workflow for these pages. When do they transition from one state to another. Do we even need statuses at all ?

Stripes architecture group has some questions about the Poppy release.

Zak: A handshake between developers, dev ops and the TC. Who makes that decision and how do we pass along that knowledge ? E.g. changes in Nodes and in the UI boxes. How to communicate this ? We have a large number of teams, all have to be aware of it.  TC should be alerted that changes are happening. We have a couple of dedicated channels for that. Most dev ops have subscribed to these channels. How can dev ops folk raise issues to the next level of community awareness ? There hasn't been a specific piece of TC to move that along.

Craig: There is a fourth group, "Capacity Planning" or "Release Planning". Slack is the de facto communication channel.  There are no objections to using Slack. An example is the Java 17 RFC. 

Craig: The TC gets it on the agenda and we will discuss it. The TC gets the final say.

Marc Johnson: We shouldn’t use the DevOps Channel. The dev ops folks have made it clear that it should only be used for support requests made to them.

Jakub: Our responsibility is to avoid piling up technical debt.

Marc: Some set of people have to actually make the call. Who lowers the chequered flag ?

Craig: It needs to ultimately come to the TC at least for awareness. There is a missing piece. Capacity Planning needs to provide input here. 

Marc: Stakeholders / Capacity Planning could make that decision. Who makes the decision ? Is it the government or is it some parts of the body ?

Marc: the developers community, the dev ops community and sys ops are involved. For example the Spring Framework discussion or the Java 17 discussion. But it was completely separate to the TC decision. It is a coordination and communication effort.

Marc: Maybe the TC needs to let go that they are the decision makers so that they be a moderating group.

Jakub: I agree with Marc. But we are not a system operating group. Dependency management should be in the responsibility of Release management. There are structures in the project for that.

Jason Root: I agree with Jakub and with Marc also. Policies should drive operational/release/support aspects of Folio.

Jason Root: If the idea of “support” is that frameworks are supported, then of course the project should meet that.

Marc Johnson
Some group needs to inform OleksAii when a relevant policy event occurs.
These documents effectively ARE the manifestation of the policy.

Craig: This is a topic for the next Monday session.

Craig to see if Oleksii Petrenko could join us to discuss the process for updating the officially supported technologies lists.

Possible topic/activity for a Wednesday session:

Discuss/brainstorm:

• Ideas for the type of developer-facing documentation we think would be most helpful for new developers
• How we might bring existing documentation up to date and ensure it's consistent 
• etc.