I strongly disagree with requiring an apache.org email address for committers. We have enough trouble attracting committers as it is. By making this a policy we're throwing up a barrier to contributors becoming committers.
I was at the Texas Linux Fest this weekend and I asked Karen Sandler, Lawyer and Executive Director of Software Freedom Conservancy (a FOSS foundation), about this. The answer (of course) was "It depends." Among other things, it depends on the company that is employing the committer. That company may have a very strong policy about what email address gets used on commits. Just because a committer may come from a company with such a policy, doesn't mean that we should automatically exclude them. We need to look into the future and consider the consequences of our actions before making preference a policy. This is not about Rackspace. Rackspace is very open source centric and very committed to upstream projects. Committers are able to use their discretion for what email addresses they use on commits. My personal preference is to use my Rackspace email address because they pay me to work on open source and I'm proud about that. This is not about intellectual property (AFAIK). The email address used in no way imparts any IP ownership. I've read nothing on [1] and [2] that requires a committer to use their @apache.org address. We should be putting our time and energy into finding ways to lower the barriers to joining our community and not raising them. If requiring an @apache.org email in commits is not mandated by the ASF, it should not be mandated by jclouds. The change to the Committer’s Guide [3] should be reverted. I would also be interested to hear what our mentors have to say on this subject. Everett [1] http://www.apache.org/dev/committers.html [2] http://www.apache.org/dev/new-committers-guide.html [3] https://wiki.apache.org/jclouds/Committers%20Guide?action=diff&rev1=8&rev2=9 On Jun 16, 2014, at 10:33 AM, Everett Toews <everett.to...@rackspace.com> wrote: > The issue of whether or not to require an apache.org email address for > committers came up in a pull request a few days ago [1]. A change was made to > the Committer’s Guide [2] requiring committers to use their apache.org email > address. > > This change was premature as it did not get consensus from the jclouds’ > committers. The issue needs to be discussed before this change can be > considered a requirement. > > Everett > > [1] https://github.com/jclouds/jclouds/pull/397#issuecomment-45972870 > [2] https://wiki.apache.org/jclouds/Committers%20Guide?action=diff
