[consult] Call for Community Consultation - Software Repository

[Robert E. Seastrom]

My thoughts as proposal author inline:

Member Services <info at arin.net> writes:

> ARIN received a suggestion (2008.1) that "ARIN shall maintain a software 
> repository (with retrieval via anonymous FTP, HTTP, or other protocols 
> in keeping with best current practices) for user-contributed schemas, 
> software, and other tools for dealing with data published by ARIN."
>
> The complete suggestion can be viewed at:
> http://www.arin.net/acsp/suggestions/2008-1.html
>
> As a result, ARIN would like to solicit input to the following questions 
> from the following community:
> 1. Should software in this repository be restricted only to 
> contributions that are licensed to be in the public domain? If so, what 
> license should be used (GNU/BSD/others)?

ARIN should be neutral as to license or indeed whether there is any
license at all.  I'm personally partial to the BSD/MIT license, but to
be honest I never considered putting any kind of license at all on the
PHP-based loadup scripts for bulk whois which I wrote (and got me
thinking about good places to publish them, which led to this
proposal).  I didn't envision any kind of non-source licensed
software, but I don't have a problem with shareware, nagware,
trialware, or anything else so long as it deals with ARIN data sets or
services.  An expensive address management system plug-in module that
did auto-SWIP submission, or a gold plated commercial RWHOIS server
would be acceptable as far as I'm concerned.

> 2. Should the repository allow separate developers facilities to 
> maintain code directly (tools like subversion) or be a static-read only 
> repository?

It was never my intent to have ARIN be a competitor to SourceForge;
only to provide a central location to access such software.

> 3. Should the repository only house collections that reflect ARIN's mission?

I would think that the answer would be "yes"; ARIN should not be in
the "general mirror site" business any more than they should be
players in SourceForge's space.  Most tools that manipulate ARIN's
datasets would fall under this rubric, though I can envision some
applications (email address extractor and spam generator for bulk
whois dumps, for instance) that would be out of scope.  Clearly, the
ARIN PM for this needs latitude to determine whether software is
appropriate or not, with the usual check & balance of the appeals
process.

                                        ---Rob