Open Stack

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Daniel P. Berrange
<berrange at redhat.com> 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.

+1000

>
> Regards,
> Daniel
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