On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:

A slightly more formal way to do this would be to explicitly canonicalize "Apache Way" policies like this at the apache.org level, and these automatically become the default policies for any Apache project unless that project deliberately (perhaps within some limits TBD) chooses to operate differently. The requirement for following these (or specializing them) would be an explicit part of a new project's charter.

Essentially, this would be a generlization of the way Jakarta projects deal with coding style conventions -- there's a default (from the original Sun coding standards) that is the assumed standard unless a different choice is explicitly made and documented for a particular subproject.

The same principle can be applied recursively -- instead of subclasses formally inheriting methods and instance variables (with the option to override), projects and subprojects formally inherit culture and standards unless they explicitly choose to override :-).

I'd bet many people perceive that Apache actually works this way; let's just make that perception into reality.

Craig