Who is this Walding (and Walding Consulting Services) character and why are there so many references to him?
The original developer was Ben Walding (who owns a company Walding Consulting Services). Ultimately the goal is to move this project to a Jakarta / Tigris style ownership model. The licenses will ultimately reflect the Apache licenses.
As mentioned above, the ultimate goal is to move to a Jakarta style model. Many people are fearful of the GPL (I happen to like it), but this kind of software needs to be plugged into the core of a product thus limiting it to at the best LGPL. You may use this product under either the Apache Software License Version 1.1 or GPL 2.0 unless specifically disclaimed otherwise (in the actual file / in a file in that directory - LICENSE.txt).
These exclusions are there to cater for the eventual problems with open-source development and having a unified license.
Contributions are welcome
Contributions must be made under the Apache Software License with copyright (full, non-exclusive, transferable) attributed to the Apache Software Foundation AND optionally under the GPL with copyright attributions to Ben Walding and the Free Software Foundation. You retain copyright on all changes you make, but you MUST attribute it as above also. This ensures that any problems with copyright can be solved by the parties involved. I have no desire to "steal" your contributions and rerelease it as a commercial product. That model won't work for this software (although DataJunction / Sybase ETL may disagree).
Before you even think about starting to modify the code... MAKE SURE ALL THE TESTS ARE RUNNING AND SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETING
If you decide to add a new structural element to the dataforge configuration, you must add a test to the XMLConfigurationTest area (add to test + test files). You must also add to the MarshallingTest area to check that the element is marshalled and unmarshalled correctly). The DTD must undergo a revision to cover the new element. The maven.xml document must be updated to know about new DTD version, as must the XMLConfiguration file.