Non technical inclusion criteria - OrderOfTheBee/addons GitHub Wiki

This outlines the non-technical rules concerning inclusion of addons into our managed list of Alfresco addons. Technical criteria are outlined in the corresponding wiki article.

Licensing

While we do not require an addon to be licensed under a specific license, we do require that the license allows (at least):

  • evaluation and/or non-commercial use free of charge
  • access to the source artifacts of the addon covered by the license

We encourage addon authors and commercial entities to consider licenses approved by the open source initiative. Choosing an open source license does not restrict anyone in building a viable business model around their software.

We recognise that integration addons may need to work with 3rd-party libraries or applications that may not be under the control of the addon author. If those 3rd-party libraries or applications do not meet the basic requirements above, the following are refined requirements for inclusion:

  • a significant portion (>= 75 %) of the features / use cases the addon provides is usable free of charge either with a free (potentially unsupported) version, a reduced functionality version or a limited trial version of any 3rd-party component
  • any 3rd-party component is covered by basic documentation of the APIs used by the addon either in a public form (i.e. web-based wiki, blogs), bundled with the addon or packaged with a version of the component that conforms to the previous requirement

State

We require all addons to be in at least a "beta" state - preferably in a "production-ready" state - with a public release that has a distinct version number (e.g. not including -SNAPSHOT).

We recognise that state labels may sometimes be assigned arbitrarily without an actual release and/or test cycle. We reserve the right to determine an addon not to be in a "beta" or "production-ready" state for the purpose of inclusion under the following conditions:

  • the addon does not have a public release or development history to indicate maturation
  • the addon authors credentials does not indicate professional qualification or history of involvement with Alfresco
  • preliminary tests of the addon from a user perspective reveal obvious or substantially restricting issues / bugs

As such a decision may involve subjective judgement calls, it requires at least two reviewers from the addon committee and - if requested by the addon author or public community - a detailed account of the reasoning.

Public Listing

We require all addons to be listed on the official Alfresco Addons site. The listing is required to be complete in regards to

  • description of purpose
  • information about licensing and nature of addon, i.e. installable extension to Repository/Share, tooling or other
  • (claimed) compatibility with a current version of Alfresco
  • link to either source code or installable binary downloads

Documentation

  • Any addon must be accompanied with documentation on how to install, configure and use it in a sufficient manner. An unfamiliar user should require only one (step-by-step) pass of the documentation to succeed in these aspects without encountering noticable errors, requiring multiple restarts or asking for support/help in a public forum or mailing list.
  • The addon documentation must list any dependencies on other addons, third-party components or environments with the respective version range(s) of supported releases.
  • The documentation must clearly state which minimal version of Alfresco is required / supported.