On 06/03/2011 03:58 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 10:24 PM,<robert_w...@us.ibm.com> wrote:
Corporate assignments are notorious at the ASF for disappearing
communities. Sometimes, there is momentum to keep going, often
times there is not. Communities are based on individuals.
And individuals are often employed by corporations, and are their jobs
sometimes entail contributing to open source communities. I think we all
understand how this works.
But do you have any hard numbers, for example, showing a higher
abandonment rate for projects with more corporate assignments? That would
be an interesting correlation to show. Of course, we must also consider
the projects that never came into existence at all, for lack of corporate
sponsorship. That number is harder to estimate.
I can confirm that is is a common enough phenomenon to warrant
highlighting in the standard template:
http://incubator.apache.org/guides/proposal.html#template-reliance-on-salaried-developers
And just because corporate withdrawals are "notorious" does not mean they
are common, or that they are the greatest risk we should consider. The
Boston Strangler and Jack the Ripper were also notorious, but you have a
great risk of death falling down stairs.
The issue with corporate reassignments is that everyone just "vanishes".
They get reassigned, and go away. In OSS, individuals tend to drift off,
go onto what else interests them, or whatever. The turnover/year may be
the same, but the way the turnover happens is different.
to make things worse, because the paid FTEs tend to work full time on
the projects, they understand the code well, gain committers status
through their contributions, and so when they go, a big chunk of the
active knowledge goes along with their departure
Examples
Axis 1.x: IBM staffers all vanish.
Harmony: IBM FTEs all vanish.
I don't think we need any more, given that these show that IBM has a
track record of doing this. Maybe not your bit of the company, but we
outsiders can't tell that
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