> Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:27:41 -0700 > From: Martin Buchholz <marti...@google.com>
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 21:51, Mark Reinhold <m...@sun.com> wrote: >>> Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:27:26 -0700 >>> From: Martin Buchholz <marti...@google.com> >>> The problem is more human. One would like to give credit for good >>> ideas or good analysis, but the only official way to give credit in a >>> commit message is via a simple >>> Contributed-by: email-address >>> which raises legal doubts even when there is no copyrighted material. >> >> Exactly what sort of legal doubts do you have in mind here? >> >> We already require the contributor of any nontrivial change to submit an >> SCA prior to that change being integrated. Is that not sufficient? > > I am worried about: > - contributions that do not require a copyright assignment, > e.g. an excellent bug report Bug reports submitted to bugs.sun.com, to bugs.openjdk.java.net, or in e-mail to an openjdk.java.net list are covered by appropriate Terms of Use (ToU) statements. Are they not sufficient? > - contributions from a Google employee, because of repeated institutional > amnesia that Google has a blanket SCA, which is not reflected in > https://sca.dev.java.net/CA_signatories.htm I'm not sure why that is, but I'll look into it. >>> I guess one can abuse the Summary: field to squeeze in thank-yous, >>> but it's pretty obvious that you are circumventing the process. >> >> Perhaps -- but if we need to fix the process, then we can do that. > > It seems that for changes for which I have an external contributor, > there is a large variety in the nature of the contribution; > sometimes an off-hand remark will cause an avalanche of work on my part. > The nature of the collaboration cannot > be expressed in the commit comment. Perhaps we could have > a Thank-you: with free-form content in addition to a Contributed-by: > with the latter reflecting a legal copyright author to keep the lawyers happy. You seem to think that the Contributed-by line exists in order to keep Sun's lawyers happy. It doesn't. Sun's lawyers actually know nothing about it. We defined the Contributed-by line in order to give credit to non-author contributors in a visible and permanent way. We could equally well have called it the "Thank-you" line, but we didn't. As a changeset author you're free to list anyone whom you think worthy of credit in the Contributed-by line. Is the problem here that you assumed otherwise? If so then we just need to improve the documentation. > Speaking of which -- hopefully jcheck will soon be open-sourced?! Yes. - Mark
