Open Stack

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 5:14 PM, Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/11/2013 12:44 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> I agree with Daniel here. There's nothing wrong with marketing, and there's
> nothing wrong with a company promoting the funding that it contributed to
> get some feature written or high profile bug fixed. But, I don't believe
> this marketing belongs in the commit log. In the open source community,
> *individuals* develop and contribute code, not companies. And I'm not
> talking about joint contribution agreements, like the corporate CLA. I'm
> talking about the actual work that is performed by developers, technical
> documentation folks, QA folks, etc. Source control should be the domain of
> the individual, not the company.
>

Well said

> Best,
> -jay
>
>
>
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