On 04/16/2018 07:37 PM, Ralph Goers wrote: > IMO, it is inappropriate to add project managers to a project as a committer > just because they are employed by a company that has committers who are paid > to work on the project.
There are some companies who have a person whose sole duty is manage the employees that work on a specific open source project. As such, open source projects have two options: * grant the employee position the access needed to manage the project, so that everybody can see what is going on; * deny the employ position the needed access, and be surprised by what the company contributes. In most instances, the surprises are things that were neither anticipated, nor considered needed by the non-employee contributors; How fast could an individual expect to be given the authority to do this type of project management, without contributing a line of code? Ralph wrote: > Companies do not do the prioritization, planning, road-mapping, shaping product-design, etc of ASF projects. The committers and PMC members do that. Most of the companies that have a person whose sole duty is to manage employees that work on a specific open source project, will ignore upstream requests, if they don't have access to do management things there. This will result in undesirable surprises. If the company PM does have access at the Open Source Project level, then the input from the other contributors will be taken into consideration. Yes, there is a very fine line to walk, between allowing a company position authority to do "x", and preventing the company from taking over the project. > They can use their own Jira repo for that kind of stuff. Do you really want to see a build of, say, Apache OpenOffice, with complete L10N (Help documentation, UI, grammar checking, spell checking for both ancient, medieval, and modern forms of the official language(s), and writing system(s), etc.) for say, Crimea, North Korea, or Syria, with no prior notice, much less discussion. I have a pretty good idea of what ASF-Legal will say about that specific scenario. Sure the company can just fork the project. It has happened before, and it will happen again. But setting up conditions where forking is the only option for a community based project is, IMNSHO, non-viable. > such people can earn merit by becoming involved with the community and helping out where they can. In theory, that sounds good, but as a practical matter, how many people that have ever been on the ASF board of directors neither know/knew, nor use(d) any programming languages in getting there? IOW, they got there exclusively on their ability to write documentation, do community relations, or utilize other non-coding skills? jonathon --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
