There is also the legal issue about who has signed an ICLA and who has
agreed to give up their rights to the code.
It would not be very much fun if someone claimed that they has submitted
code under a group name and had never signed an ICLA but now wanted
Apache to stop using their code.
It is not clear who would be responsible for fixing the system and
indemnifying the coder for using his/her work without permission.
Could the person sue individual companies who use OFBiz containing
his/her code. This would be a PR nightmare.
The foundation of the ASF and the Apache License is that you can use
code without fear that someone will show up at your door and make you
stop using it because the coder never agreed to allow you to use it.
We all count on the PMC to ensure that the code base does not include
code that should not be there.
The ICLA is the first line of protection.
A Corporate CLA may also be required if the individual contributor works
for a company that owns all the code that they produce during working hours.
Might be a good idea to review this before making a decision about group
accounts.
http://www.apache.org/dev/new-committers-guide.html
http://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html#newcommitter described what needs to
be done before accepting contribution from a new person.
I am uncomfortable about wiki contributions from people without an ICLA
but code contributions from people who have not signed an ICLA is
probably going to drive ASF crazy.
Ron
On 16/09/2014 1:21 PM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
On Sep 16, 2014, at 3:32 PM, Jacques Le Roux <jacques.le.r...@les7arts.com>
wrote:
Le 16/09/2014 11:57, Scott Gray a écrit :
I think it would be better if contributors used individual accounts. Since
there was no ill intent and infra is already taking care of the issue I'm not
sure there's much to discuss.
I believe there were no ill intents. This page tends to prove it
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/~hwmofbizus : only good things
there.
But we know that the Apache way is about individual *meritocracy* and only
persons are responsible of their acts.
A PMC chair shall not forget that point:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-8229, nor a PMC member like Anil.
Premise: there are several similar non-personal users in the ASF Jira that
submit Jira tickets (for OFBiz and other ASF projects) and, as far as I know,
no one has complained or disabled them (see for example brema-dev,
opensocial.qa, blackbox.dev, teamhiro...); not all I do is with my PMC Chair on.
That account was just an experiment, a failed one I have to say, to facilitate
the exchange of information between the OFBiz community and an HWM team that
Anil has setup in order to facilitate our company contribution to the OFBiz
project; the team is composed by analysts, designers, developers and testers.
The idea was that the whole team could work on a contribution, possibly
discussing the details with the community, and then either deliver the work to
the community (patch in Jira) or communicate with one of the committers in our
team; at that point the committer would have taken charge of the contribution
(I think this is similar with what Hans is doing with several of his commits).
Rather than mentioning all the people of the team in the commit log, the idea
was to mention the team, with the committer taking ownership of the code change.
It was probably not a great idea and I am ok to step back: maybe, rather than
asking the Infra team to disable the account you could have mention your
concerns to Anil or me, but I am not complaining for your action, the heated
discussions in the last days may have played a role in your decision.
It is not a big deal for HWM, we will just adjust this process and have
individual communications with the community.
The only things I'm a bit worry about is how deserving individuals can be
recognised if they are only seen through contributions of their company?
I agree this is an open and still unresolved topic: HWM has several employees
that would be great OFBiz committers but in the past there were concerns from
some of you about the fact that HWM could be represented by too many persons.
We will see how it goes.
As the motto says: "community before code"
+1
Jacopo
Jacques
By the way, could you please pick a single list to send to? Cross-posting is
annoying and results in a bunch of duplicated or disjointed discussions in the
archives.
Regards
Scott
On 16/09/2014, at 9:43 pm, Pierre Smits <pierre.sm...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
Recently I saw some changes to wiki pages and some comments to JIRA issues
made by user hmwofbizus with name Hotwax Media OFBiz Team.
But who is Hotwax Media OFBiz Team? Is that one person or a group of
persons using the same account?
Is this what we want in an open source project under the umbrella of the
ASF? It seems to me that it makes it harder to attribute contributions to
individuals and to bestow merit and thanks to the person.
Regards,
Pierre Smits
*ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com
--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: rwhee...@artifact-software.com
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102
