Announcing the High Performance High Availability Guide documentation project

A bit of updated information on my limited involvement in the DRBD User's Guide, and something new that came out of it.

Past

After this recent post, I was – somewhat unexpectedly – contacted by Linbit and was given the information that the point of contention in the rejected patch set was this patch in which I added a joint copyright notice for hastexo to the document.

Oddly enough, this point of contention was never mentioned in the private email exchange I had about the copyright assignment issue back in December, so I was duly surprised to learn about this – had it been mentioned to me at the time, it would have been open to discussion, and we may well have avoided all the copyright assignment mess. The notice had seemed quite routine to me at the time, I didn't think much of it.

At any rate, let's let bygones be bygones.

Present

I respect Linbit's decision to not put a joint copyright statement on the front page of the document for something as simple as a spelling fix, which the patch set clearly wasn't, but I'd also like for people to understand when substantial contributions come from other parts of the community. Seeing as people will probably have different views on what constitues a substantial contribution, and seeing as I neither have the time nor inclination for lengthy discussions on that issue, I've settled on the following compromise.

I've fixed up the patch set to retract the additions about using DRBD in high-performance environments, and left the fixes and simple modifications in. Such fixes aren't a "work" in the copyright sense, they are not protected under copyright, and as such don't require copyright assignment. And I'll continue to submit such simple fixes to the User's Guide in the future when I run across them.

Future

Still, I think that the additions on InfiniBand and Dolphin are potentially useful for people, and I'd hate to waste them. So I came up with the idea of rolling it into something bigger. So here's the announcement of the High Performance High Availability Guide documentation project.

I'll be working on this in the nearer future, and it'll be released When It's Ready. I'm not quite sure where to host processed builds; maybe Andrew would be inclined to host it on ClusterLabs, maybe we want to make EPUB builds downloadable directly from GitHub. But let's cross those bridges when we get to them.

The AsciiDoc source for this HPHA guide is on GitHub, and you're welcome to build and use it with your favorite AsciiDoc processing toolchain (try a2x for example). For comments and contributions my suggestion is to use the awesome infrastructure from GitHub to its fullest; additional suggestions are here.

That Guide is under CC-BY-SA 3.0, so you are welcome to use it for any purposes commercial or non-commercial, rebuild, adapt, and share, as long as you credit the original source in a suitable way. If you wish to contribute to this guide, please be sure to be OK with CC-BY-SA 3.0. I haven't drafted a contributor licensing agreement and am unsure if we'll ever need one, but if it turns out that that's a good idea and we indeed draft one, what it's going to state is essentially just that you submit under CC-BY-SA terms, and that you're not legally or contractually barred from doing so.

For those who have insights on the CLA issue, or can recommend a CLA that's well suitable for protecting contributors and ensuring that the document can be shared freely, please leave a comment below. For those who can reassure me with good arguments that a CLA is not necessary for such an endeavor, please leave a comment too as that would truly make my day.

So, let's see where this takes us. I'm really curious to see how much contribution, and importantly from how many different sources, we can get here. Please share your thoughts!