On 4/17/07, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at damore.org> wrote: > I'd therefore suggest that any awarding of "contributor awards" consider > _personal_ contributions, regardless of place of employment. However, > work done on the behalf of a big company (like Sun Microsystems) > represents contribution by the employer, not by the individual. Such > work therefore should be excluded. (There may be other similar > contributions from outside commercial entities... I'm not sure.)
I think this is a bad idea. Part of the motivation for companies to allow/encourage/mandate their employees to participate in OpenSolaris is the idea that these contributions will help shape the direction of OpenSolaris (and Solaris) through code and other influence. If that motivation is gone, this will likely have the impact of missing out on many potential contributions from those that have put [Open]Solaris to use on a large scale or in ways not intended by the group defined as "Sun and some hobbyists". The other side of this is if a large employer (like Sun) had thousands of people contributing, they could easily have the majority in every vote if so mandated (and somehow audited) by the employer. I can honestly say that I don't believe that Sun could get all of their employee contributors to vote the same way. If they could, that would mean that the life had already been sucked out of all of those employees and the company is on a rapid downward spiral. This would imply that any such majority would be temporary. Mike -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
