data-apis / governance Goto Github PK

We need a CoC. Given that a sizable fraction of array and dataframe projects fall under the NumFOCUS umbrella, I propose to create a Consortium Code of Conduct that is adapted from the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct.

For code we have to decide what open source license to use. Most relevant projects that are community driven use the BSD-3 (or sometimes MIT) license, while most relevant projects that are driven by a company use the Apache 2.0 license.

MIT is typically preferred to BSD-3 because, while they're almost identical, there are multiple BSD licenses. See e.g. https://choosealicense.com/ for clearly recommending MIT.

So the main choices seem to be:

• MIT
• Apache 2.0

The reason why community projects have typically avoided including Apache 2.0 in the past is because it would make the code base incompatible with GPLv2 (see this explanation). That said, there were never proposals for integrating a large amount of useful code that was Apache 2.0 licensed. My sense is that nowadays GPLv2 is less relevant, and if there was Apache 2.0 with a lot of value on offer, community projects would accept it.

Another option could be to dual-license as both MIT and Apache 2.0 to easy integration into other code bases, although that is a little unusual and may be more confusing than helpful.

For documents we also have to pick a license. Options include:

• Using the same license as for code (see above). This is how documentation and website content in open source projects is typically treated.
• Use a Creative Commons License
• Use something like the Unlicense

If everyone could state their preference in a comment on this issue, that would be very useful.

While this initiative is important, keep in mind that given that "PyData" is a significant community brand (with conferences, etc.) that some people might see "PyData API Consortium" and ask "who put you in charge". By utilizing the mark there is a pseudoauthority that some may not be happy about. To be honest it makes me a bit uncomfortable personally.

In any case, it might not be the worst idea to consider giving a more neutral name to this effort.

Now that name has changed, maybe we should also rename the Github org?

Maybe data-apis to match the proposed website name?

@aregm said in gh-2: ".... Better to be a free specification to be used by all interested parties, but closed to the change and rebranding."

The rebranding part of that seems to suggest using a trademark. I'm not too worried about this early on (it's hard to get people to put significant effort into this stuff), but it's a conversation worth having now indeed.

Now that the consortium name is settled, we looked at finding a good domain name for a website for it. It's not completely obvious what the best domain is. We started with python-data-apis.org, and because that's a bit long we also grabbed data-apis.org (which we could use directly, or forward to the python- version).

If anyone sees a problem with that or has a better idea, please comment.