Create a process and structure to accept and organize plugins donated to OIE from other developers

[jonbartels]

Problem Statement

OIE has been offered and accepted donations of several plugins. We need to define a process to review, organize, and distribute these plugins.

Existing donated plugins

SSL from NovaMap (coming January 2026)
git-ext from Kiran A.
ldap from Chris S.
mfa from Chris S.

Goals

• Gratitude and Respect
  • Show that a donation is appreciated and respected
  • Show users the value of the plugin and that it is of sufficient quality
  • Encourage participation, development of new plugins
  • Encourage donation of older, but valuable, work that owners no longer want to maintain
• Process and Procedure
  • Have a process to accept a donation, ensure licenses, copyright, etc. is correctly assigned
  • Have a process to build and integrate the work with OIE
  • Have a process to distribute the plugin in a streamlined way with OIE
  • Have a clear way to organize these plugins in repositories in the OIE project
  • Have a consistent build and distribution process
• Quality and Usability
  • Ensure users have some understanding of the value and quality of plugins
  • Ensure users can find and utilize the plugins

Ideas

Examples from other projects

• Other inclubator projects (eg Apache)
• Tiered approach from HomeAssistant - https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/quality_scale/

Rough proposal

• Vetted - We accepted the donation. If it wasn't up to some minimal standard we would have declined the donation. Retains the original authors build and distribution patterns
• Distributed - We have set up build pipelines, quality gates, and build and distribute the tool. We sign it. This is available for manual download for users who want it.
• Bundled - We have the plugin available (possibly by default) from the installer, docker, ZIPs, etc.

Deliverables

• Documentation describing how to organize plugins in the OIE project
• Documentation describing what is needed to accept a donated work, licenses, copyright assignment, etc.
• Links from governance.md to reference these

[jonbartels]

Relates to #33.

[jonbartels]

@tonygermano had some feedback during a steering committee meeting.

• Is the donation process significant when we're dealing with open-source projects anyway? OIE can adopt any open-source project we want, thats how open-source works. A donation becomes part of a bigger thing
• License compatibility - A donation matters when the copyright holders are willing to re-license the plugin so that the license is compatible with OIE.

@ssrowe also suggested that this guidance identify or define compatible licenses and/or state that we have to have MPL licenses.

@kayyagari wants to outright transfer git-ext.