> > Twice over the past two years I have made attempts at joining the > Blastwave maintainer community, only to ultimately be rejected because > I do not have a "work email address" (I am a student (older student, > far from a freshman)). This was explained to me by Phil Brown as > being for legal reasons, as employers are more responsible for the > actions of their employees than educational institutions are. Fair > enough, this makes some sense to me, especially considering the > setting of many Solaris installations. > > In that regard, there is /some/ exclusivity at Blastwave. This rather > put me off, since one of the projects has accepted patches by me in > the past which provides Solaris support (Licq), and another one of the > projects now lists packages created by me on their homepage (gtkpod). > The latter even has CSW dependencies, and was created using modified > cswutils scripts. > > This post is a bit offtopic, I admit, but "exclusivity" activated > something in my brain like a keyword. I am a happy Blastwave user who > has been following most of this discussion. >
Eric, this is a really tough policy. It is tough to enforce and tough to tell people, good people, that no, we can not have you building software that will be running in the servers at Lockheed Martin, NASA and MIT. The issue of liability has been a very tough one but it was needed. Let's consider the posibility that someone joins and claims to be a programmer for company XYZ Inc. In truth they work for no one. We call up company XYZ to confirm that they actually work there and then someone will say "yes, they work here and we will put you right through." In truth it is two people in the same room and their business is to destroy servers with really nasty software. So we have another stage of verification. Someone must actually know this person and be able to verify them. Also a really tough policy to enforce. I think we had a person in Germany that waited for a while before someone could drive over to them and meet them. We also had to say goodbye to another valuable maintainer because he could not be verified. Have there been exceptions? Absolutely. No one ever questioned Eric Boutilier or Torrey McMahon ( http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/torrey ) or Jörg Schilling. But some measures, as I am sure you will agree, need to be enforced to ensure safety and quality. Clearly we need to look at your case again. -- Dennis Clarke _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
