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Date:      Fri, 15 Jan 2016 05:09:27 +0000 (UTC)
From:      Benjamin Kaduk <bjk@FreeBSD.org>
To:        doc-committers@freebsd.org, svn-doc-all@freebsd.org, svn-doc-head@freebsd.org
Subject:   svn commit: r48022 - head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status
Message-ID:  <201601150509.u0F59RJi090374@repo.freebsd.org>

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Author: bjk
Date: Fri Jan 15 05:09:27 2016
New Revision: 48022
URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/48022

Log:
  Add core entry from matthew

Modified:
  head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml

Modified: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml
==============================================================================
--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml	Fri Jan 15 04:18:08 2016	(r48021)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml	Fri Jan 15 05:09:27 2016	(r48022)
@@ -2471,4 +2471,164 @@
       </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>



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