mosquitto-users team mailing list archive

[Roger Light <roger@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

Something that has been brewing for a long time now was a proposal for
the Mosquitto project to move under the umbrella of the Eclipse
Foundation. This has moved forward so I wanted to take some time to
explain what it means for Mosquitto and everybody that uses it.

First off, you might be wondering what Eclipse has to do with it. If
you aren't aware, Eclipse isn't just the IDE but a whole host of
projects, and not all written in Java either. Paho, the project for
MQTT client implementations, is an Eclipse project and they also host
other M2M type projects like Koneki and Ponte. I am a member of the
Paho project.

So why change anything anyway? One of the things I've wanted to
achieve since mosquitto started becoming more widely known is to move
away from the image of being a one man hobby project to giving a more
solid, reliable appearance and attracting more development to the
project. I think moving to a foundation like Eclipse will help with
that. There are other reasons as well. Again, a while back IBM made
mutterings about open sourcing RSMB, their MQTT broker (which
mosquitto sought to emulate and supersede in config, functionality and
performance). Two open source, largely compatible MQTT brokers seems
like an unnecessary division of labour and to be honest I wanted
mosquitto to be the one that "won" (it's a better name if nothing
else!) Moving to Eclipse helps with that aim.

There will be some changes by necessity, but before I get on to that
these are the things that I don't want to change.

Most importantly, I don't intend to stop working on mosquitto. That
would be daft after getting this far with the process. I will still
make packages for WIndows and Linux distros as they are now. I'll
still host a test server, although that may end up being the same as
m2m.eclipse.org. I'm sure there should be more in this list, but I
think that covers the important points.

The license is going to change (if you've contributed changes I'll be
getting in touch at some point to get your agreement that you're happy
with that, or else I'll have to rewrite/remove your contribution). All
code will be dual licensed under the EPL and EDL. The EDL is basically
the BSD license, so if you're already happy with that license then
nothing really changes for you.

The mailing lists will change. I'm sorry about that, it's a pain.
Likewise bugs will move to the eclipse bugzilla.

The code will be hosted in a git repository. This is something I've
been pestered about and have been resistant to change (git isn't
better, you just used it first most likely) but I do recognise that
it'll make it more accessible to others. It's another reason to move,
to force that to happen.

As part of the project submission, Ian Craggs of IBM, who wrote RSMB,
has managed with a lot of effort to obtain authorisation for RSMB to
be open sourced. Both mosquitto and RSMB code will be in the same
project with the aim of cherry picking features and ideas to make a
better overall broker. The project itself will remain mosquitto
though. One particularly nice benefit of this is that the currently
not released MQTT-S code for RSMB will be included, which saves an
awful lot of work for me. Ian is of course going to be one of the
committers on the new project.

The project proposal is at
www.eclipse.org/proposals/technology.mosquitto/ It will remain open
for community review for a minimum of two weeks before anything else
happens. If you have any questions you can raise them on this list, or
in the Eclipse proposal forum. You can also ask to be added to the
proposal as an interested party if you wish.

Regards,

Roger