Thanks for this thread. I am learning a lot from these perspectives. At the risk of adding noise, I'll share mine.
I first want to state my appreciation for how ASF governance works and how it differs from other foundations. I did not really understand this when I started and it is one of my favorite things I have learned these past few years. Having recently reviewed other governance models including some of those listed here, I would be much less interested in participating in that form of project. I would not like to attribute contributions to corporations, nor highlight affiliations of listed contributors. Here's why: - Users and contributors already know who to contact to advance their goals: dev@ and user@ lists. Encouraging backchannel to a corporation rather than public discussion with the project is not good. We should do the exact opposite: encourage companies to be transparent about their goals in funding work on the project, for users and other contributors to give feedback on. - Many of Beam's committers and PMC members have changed employment over time. Beam has benefited from this IMO. Specifically because it was the *individuals* who carried their knowledge, interests, & merit with them and continued to contribute to Beam. - In Beam, we used to have on our website a table of PMC and committers, with opt-in column for their employment. Due to the changes, this got out of date quickly. When updating it, we ultimately decided to just link to the ASF phonebook. - People read the table at a point in time and later remembered out-of-date information, so even at an interpersonal level had the wrong idea about other contributors context. So transparency actually led to misinformation in practice. I'd love to be transparent without this downside. - Employment and funding is not that simple! What about if some contributions are by contractors paid by yet another company? (or yet another layer of indirection!) Who are you going to thank? Laying out these relationships (why? to allow users to try to backchannel influence?) is complex and often confidential. Who is really driving the investment in some area of a project? The one with the job/contract listing or the one who chooses to pursue that job/contract? And somewhat related to that last point, there's an angle to this that I haven't heard here yet, that to me is absolute and transcends ASF's policies: An employer tends to own copyright on their employees output by default. That's enough. Are the regents of universities great researchers? Do the owners of sports teams score points? Similarly, attributions for contributions (code or not) of paid individuals still belongs to the individuals. A company does not design systems, write code, have conversations, give talks, write articles, etc. It cannot do any of these things, because it is not a person. So, specifically "attributing contributions to commercial vendors who support an Apache project" is abhorrent to me, personally. If a project's site thanks a company for paying people to work on the project, it isn't a direct affront to this, but it is perilously close and has most of the same pragmatic downsides. If an individual wants to thank their employer for paying them to work on a project, that's their business. For the record, I'm *very* grateful for the privilege to be paid to work on Apache projects; it is a defining aspect of my career choices. Seems like there are lots of possibilities other than a "thanks for paying people to work on this" page. I'm curious to here direct thoughts on these: - A "powered by" page that lists interested vendors? (I noticed a lot of these) - Joan's idea that companies could list individuals? (similar to the point that if a company wants to advertise its relationship to a project, it has the resources to do so) - A company could also not list individuals but just say "proud to support XYZ open source project" and even write about how they use it and why they pay people to contribute. I'm not a proponent of any of these, in the abstract, but more curious what others think. Kenn On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 8:06 AM Patricia Shanahan <p...@acm.org> wrote: > On 4/17/2019 11:27 AM, Griselda Cuevas wrote: > > > It brings clarity to project roadmap and dependencies. > > Knowing what companies are investing in a given area, allows users & > > contributors know who to contact to move their own contributions > faster and > > gives companies the ability to accept user suggestions. > > Back when I was working in the computer industry, having to contact a > competitor to expedite my ideas and to feed them suggestions would have > been a very serious negative on contributing to a project. > > Even now, I would prefer my ideas to get full consideration by a > project, without having to work through a third party. > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org > >
