Open Stack

Not to be contrarian, but 92% of the commits in Havana came from
non-individual contributions. The majority of those came from big name
companies (IBM, RedHat, etc).

What I see as a great thing is the increasing number [and diversity] of
companies committing, especially from end user/operators.

In the operator case, there are examples where an operator uses another
companies Dev's to write a patch for their install that gets commited
upstream. In this case, the patch was sponsored by the operator company,
written and submitted by a developer employed by another.

Allowing for tracking if the fact that an operator/end user sponsored a
patch to be created further incents more operators/end users to put funds
towards getting features written.

This is a positive for the project, it's Dev's and the community. It also
opens up an expanded market for contract developers working on specifier
features.

My perspective - I work at and operator / integrator. I have my teams
working on multiple projects including OpenStack. Peers of mine in Silicon
Valley who have funded major OpenStaxk development Efforts have required
that code to be released, but have had trouble verifying. The sponsored by
tag would provide an easy way of tracking, as well as further incent the
behavior of funding improvements.

My 2 cents.

On Thursday, November 14, 2013, Jay Pipes 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.
>
> Best,
> -jay
>
>
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