Open Stack

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 03:20:20PM +0100, Nicolas Barcet wrote:
> Dear TC members,
> 
> Our companies are actively encouraging our respective customers to have the
> patches they mission us to make be contributed back upstream.  In order to
> encourage this behavior from them and others, it would be nice that if
> could gain some visibility as "sponsors" of the patches in the same way we
> get visibility as "authors" of the patches today.
> 
> The goal here is not to provide yet another way to count affiliations of
> direct contributors, nor is it a way to introduce sales pitches in contrib.
>  The only acceptable and appropriate use of the proposal we are making is
> to signal when a patch made by a contributor for another comany than the
> one he is currently employed by.
> 
> For example if I work for a company A and write a patch as part of an
> engagement with company B, I would signal that Company B is the sponsor of
> my patch this way, not Company A.  Company B would under current
> circumstances not get any credit for their indirect contribution to our
> code base, while I think it is our intent to encourage them to contribute,
> even indirectly.
> 
> To enable this, we are proposing that the commit text of a patch may
> include a
>    sponsored-by: <sponsorname>
> line which could be used by various tools to report on these commits.
>  Sponsored-by should not be used to report on the name of the company the
> contributor is already affiliated to.
> 
> We would appreciate to see your comments on the subject and eventually get
> your approval for it's use.

IMHO, lets call this what it is: "marketing".

I'm fine with the idea of a company wanting to have recognition for work
that they fund. They can achieve this by putting out a press release or
writing a blog post saying that they "funded awesome feature XYZ to bring
benefits ABC to the project" on their own websites, or any number of other
marketing approaches. Most / many companies and individuals contributing
to OpenStack in fact already do this very frequently which is fine / great.

I don't think we need to, nor should we, add anything to our code commits,
review / development workflow / toolchain to support such marketing pitches.
The identities recorded in git commits / gerrit reviewes / blueprints etc
should exclusively focus on technical authorship, not sponsorship. Leave
the marketing pitches for elsewhere.

Regards,
Daniel
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