I'm generally in agreement with Rich, Jim, Shane, Sam and the other "grey beards" who have responded on this thread already. We recognize the individual, not the company, and the individual gets the merit.
That said, there are always rumours and scuttlebutt floating around of this sort: "If company Q wasn't supporting Project X, Project X would have died by now." Or: "Company J went out of business, so Project F is basically abandoned." While industry insiders and project members themselves are largely aware of these special situations, others outside of the community may not be. Gris, this is the flip-side of what you are proposing: making this implicit knowledge more explicit. The danger in writing it down is that it will change people's opinions of . By making these (sometimes intentionally) nebulous relationships more concrete by putting them on project home pages, you will necessarily impact how the project is perceived, likely reducing its autonomy. Do we want to do this? I think perhaps not. One thing that's occurred to me in the past is: wouldn't it be nice to know exactly who everyone on a given PMC works for, in the event of "blocs" of voters banding together smelling fishy in terms of project independence? Then, on [5], I read this: > Apache projects are run solely by their PMCs, as projects independent > of outside corporations or organizations. It is important to maintain > both the actual independence of our PMCs from third parties, as well > as to ensure that PMCs are clearly seen to be run as independent > projects, free of any controlling, exclusive, or otherwise > exclusionary relationships with third parties or outside > corporations. So again we have the problem of "writing it down may make it seem truer than it really is," and creating the perception of people not knowing how to take off their Corp hat and put on their PMC hat. We have to balance this against the need for projects to have the assurances that their PMC is acting neutrally. Right now, I think the only escalation path is for the project to go to the Board if they feel the PMC is railroading a project away from its best interests...and I'm still not sure that doesn't put an unnecessarily high barrier in those contributors' way. But I digress. On 2019-04-17 16:54, Dinesh Joshi wrote: > Some employers actually employ people from the community to work on > Open Source projects. They should also be recognized. And (I believe, see the next paragraph!) those companies are more than welcome to put up a page (on their own websites) saying that they are privileged to have, on their payroll, distinguished individuals who are recognized as contributors, committers, PMC members and ASF members within their ranks. This would show the company's commitment to the individuals involved, which I think is a key point I'm taking away from this discussion. Shane: I couldn't tell from the marks linking page[5] whether or not this would be acceptable, since my suggestion is precisely the reverse of what is outlined there. > Regardless, I have a different view on this. It would be a nice for > individuals to fill in their professional affiliations to help others > connect with their peers in their organizations. Perhaps this could > be displayed in the people directory? It is along the lines of > allowing individuals to declare their location which ASF already > allows[1] FOAF files can certainly include that information, in the Organization or workplaceHomepage fields, though these would be supplementary to also including Apache in those same fields. I believe FOAF allows for multiples of these two classes, but I didn't read the spec in detail[2]. The question is whether or not we willfully disclose this information. Currently it's not on our list of things we disclose on ASF websites[4], and I'd be nervous about doing this across our entire base of committers without explicit assent by ComDev and maybe Legal. Another option is the 3rd party GitHub service, where you can show your corporate affiliation via the organisations you participate in. Not every company has a GitHub Org, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't browse thru frequent contributors to Apache projects there and look to see if I could see who employs those people. An ancillary question would be whether or not it's time to move from the largely abandoned FOAF format to the schema.org Person format instead, possibly in JSON-LD format [3]. This is a tangent and if we want to discuss this let's do so in a new thread. > [1] http://community.zones.apache.org/map.html [2]: http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ [3]: https://schema.org/Person [4]: https://home.apache.org/foaf/index.html [5]: https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/linking --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
