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The association, or "OCA" for short, is an independent nonprofit legal entity established to support the needs of the Open Source Odoo community. The association will serve as an organizing body, a public technology commons, a development community manager, and anevent sponsor. Once fully established, the association will provide a legal and administrative framework to better support the ongoing developments and promotion of the OCA's projects.
The association is a membership-based organization incorporated under the laws of association, Switzerland. The association was expressly incorporated as a not-for-profit organization.
The association is a nonprofit entity and has no shareholders. Thus, nobody "owns" the association. However, the association does have delegate members who, like the shareholders in a for-profit company, elect the association's board of directors. The board of directors, acting together, manages the affairs of the association.
The membership is composed of users, supporters, promoters, and developers of the Open Source Odoo software. Becoming a member is as easy as joining the site and contributing to the association's goals. Beyond members, there are various delegate members.
New delegate members are nominated and elected by existing delegate members during the annual delegate member election.
Yes! First, a regular member can do everything a delegate member can do, except vote in the Board elections. They can speak up and contribute in every way. The association aims to be a do-ocracy, and so the way to have influence is to do things! Ultimately, of course, the association will only succeed in its mission if the entire community gets involved -- so please don't hesitate! We need your help!
The Board of Directors were voted in an initial round by the initial association membership and then by the elected association members.
No. Odoo SA has provided generous support to help establish the association, and some of their people may be part of the association in the future as anybody else.
OCA is governed by a board of directors elected by the delegate members. The board selects a President, Treasurer and Secretary as officers with particular areas of responsibility.
Projects are operated by Project Steering Committees (PSC) which select a Chair or Board liaison who is designated as officer of the OCA after confirmation by the board. The board also designates some special purpose committees responsible for particular areas with a chair who is an officer. Typical committees and projects operate fairly autonomously and largely by consensus. However, as needed, the board can step in to address issues inconsistent with the goals and responsibilities of OCA. By virtue of their selection of the board and new delegate members, the delegate membership are the ultimate authority at OCA.
On its formation, the most representative work has been achieved by the former community organization. See the OCA's Projects for the official list.
Projects (or modules) need to go through the vote of charted members to join the association. Details on how to apply and how the process works are available on the OCA's Projects page.
Only a limited number of projects (and modules) can be effectively handled be the OCA at a time, so please be patient.
Yes. The individual contributions in the OCA's projects are expected to grant the copyright to the association. At the creation of the association, all projects were not in that case and followed a review process.
No. Generally speaking this is not required, however, all the committers (as part of the community reviewer team and their related teams) must have signed one. For more details, please read the CLA page.
No. The association is not interested in controlling the association projects. However, the association projects are expected to follow some association rules, mostly around the need to ensure that project code is not legally encumbered (e.g., not stolen, or improperly contributed), and that appropriate controls are in place to ensure code is properly contributed. Some additional expectations may exist around projects operating in an open and accountable fashion, handling association-provided funding appropriately and not taking actions that will cause legal problems or negative goodwill for the association. The association also encourages, but does not require, projects to support the association goals, such as implementing standard-based interoperability.
The OCA projects are typically governed by a Project Steering Committee (PSC). The PSC should operate openly and with a consensus-based approach. While the PSC may delegate specific responsibilities to particular project members, it is ultimately intended to be the governing body for the project. A benevolent dictatorship is not considered a suitable open and consensus-based approach to governance.
Do I have to use mandated source control / web system / bug system / mailing list from the association?
No. Projects joining the association can continue to use their traditional source control system, website system, bug tracker and mailing list software. However, the association does recommend to use Launchpad to provide a more consistent way for users and developers to interact with the different association projects.
The association only accepts projects that use OSI-certified licenses for their software and requires that projects stick to OSI-certified licenses. This includes common licenses such as MIT/X, BSD, GPL, and LGPL. The association encourages library projects to use the AGPL rather than the GPL, but does not require it. The association also discourages a proliferation of new and incompatible licenses.
Visit the OCA website. Join the main community association list. You don't need to be a programmer. You can also request your membership by fulfilling and sending this form.
The governance model currently being formulated will define the legal and related issues on how the code will be accepted into the association software projects. Currently, you can submit your merge proposals on any of the related OCA's project. It will be reviewed by the team's owner and the community's reviewer team. Find more details on the contributors agreement here.
To be accepted in one of the team, start by suggesting merge proposals and reviewing others' work. When significant work has been achieved, you can apply for the team by requesting your membership on the community reviewer mailing list. Note that reviewers, in their committers role, would have to sign the CLA.
The association is now soliciting organizational sponsorships. However, contributions of time for committee work, development, documentation, testing, user support, and advocacy are the preferred forms of contribution from individuals.
Yes, but the association considers the OCA name and logo to be trademarks.
You can easily fork this github repository and make a pull request that will be reviewed. The website was built with Jekyll-Bootstrap.