[oslc-core] Eclipse Lyo project proposal

[Dave]

After discussing with individual committers, Steve Speicher and I,
along with other OSLC community members, have proposed the creation of
a new product project at the Eclipse Foundation, based on the code we
have in the OSLC Tools project at SourceForge [1]. You can read the
whole proposal on the Eclipse website here:

   http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/technology.lyo

I think there will be a lot of benefits to being an Eclipse project,
especially as our project grows. It will be easier to recruit new
contributors and committers with Eclipse governance. We'll benefit
from Eclipse infrastructure and process. And, we'll benefit in other
ways by joining a community of projects with similar goals, including
Mylyn, Orion and who have a focus on system and software development
tools. You'll note that the proposed project will continue to have
relationships to a number of other open source projects, especially
those related to Linked Data, RESTful web services and web development
in general.

I'd like to comment about two items in the proposal, the charter and
the license.

You'll notice in the proposal that the Eclipse Lyo project's charter
is to develop an SDK for OSLC. As we wrote the proposal we realized
that perhaps the best way to characterize the OSLC Tools codebase is
an "OSLC Software Development Kit (SDK)" i.e. a set of assets that
help developers adopt and implement OSLC. It's my opinion that
organizing as an SDK project will help us focus on the needs of
developers and help developers understand the project's value
proposition. The existence of the project won't change the work we do
on specifications here at the OSLC community, it will be a companion
project for our work.

You'll also notice that we are proposing a dual license with Eclipse
Public License (EPL) and Eclipse Distribution License (EDL). This is a
side-effect of joining Eclipse, but I think it's an acceptable one as
the EDL is a permissive BSD open source license, like the ASL which we
use now, and perfect for an SDK.

I hope you'll greet this news with enthusiasm and support :-) If you
want to add yourself as an interested party to the proposed project,
or give feedback on the proposal, the appropriate forum is here:

  http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/i/7/

Thanks,
Dave

--
David M. Johnson
OSLC Core Workgroup Lead
IBM Rational Software

[1] http://oslc-tools.sourceforge.net