Guidelines to help you comply with the ASF release and distribution policies

DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFTFINAL - this has now been published at https://incubator.apache.org/guides/distribution.html please make all future changes there

One of the goals of incubation is to teach podling communities how to build and distribute ASF-compliant releases. A podling community should begin to familiarise themselves with the ASF policies for distribution. Those policies can be found at https://infra.apache.org/release-distribution. The following will help you comply with current policy.

Motivation

The ASF is responsible for providing software which can be used in accordance with our license. Code or artifacts built from code without clean IP can mean that code that doesn't belong to us slips into users projects. This would expose our users and the ASF to the risk of lawsuit. One purpose of the incubating process and its release process is to ensure that our users can trust our projects. Releasing artifacts built from code that hasn't been approved by the IPMC circumvents this process. It robs the PPMC of learning opportunities. It increases the likelihood that we might accidentally betray the trust of our users.

At the same time binary artifacts on distribution platforms are important to our users for a wide variety of reasons. This document is intended to balance these priorities. If you believe you have a case in which this document is inadequate to your situation please bring this to our attention by mailing either general@incubator.apache.org or private@incubator.apache.org

Release Platforms

In addition to the Apache mirror system incubating projects may distribute artifacts on other platforms as long as they follow these general guidelines:

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Motivation

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Maven distribution

To comply with ASF release and distributions please ensure the following:

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