Radcliffe, Mark wrote:
I have never been consulted on this issue, but this interpretation of the bylaws is incorrect. ATC is defined to require someone to be an Individual Member, but ATC is concerned with voting for the Technical Committee, it does not restrict contributions. Anyone, member or non-member, can submit a contribution if they have signed the relevant CLA.
My point is that the bylaws redefined a term that was already widely in use in our community ("ATC"). It used to mean "contributor to the code" and suddenly it meant "subset of contributors to the code that are also Foundation individual members". So it's not entirely weird that the instructions to "become an ATC" ended up including "join the foundation as an individual member". ATC still means "recent contributor to the code" in most people's minds. The dev lounge at summits had a sign "ATC only". I'm not sure we actually meant to restrict that lounge to a subset of contributors. Now this is probably something we can fix, we just need to use a new term for the "contributors" and some sane and foolproof way to determine whose subset of those are an "ATC" (new meaning). -- Thierry Carrez (ttx)