Snipping to an issue I have with one particular comment. On Thu, 3 Jul 2003, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
> > In summary the most serious issues to this proposal are: > > 1. diversity of committership. I'd personally like to see >51% of the > ACTIVE committership from a different company. So long as a decision in one > company can MAKE the vote, you don't have an Apache project, you have a > corporate subproject at Apache. > Andy, I agree with you that diversity is important, but your proposed standard (more than half the committers from "elsewhere") has some distrubing implications that are worth exploring. * There is an implied assumption that the proposed committers will behave the way that their employer wants, not the way that they want. Although it is too simplistic to say that this never happens (our individual actions are public record, so of course you take into consideration what your employer might think), developers that are solely "corporate mouthpiece" players should never have been elected as committers in the first place. * There is an implied assumption that all the committers from the same company will vote the same way. I can tell you from lots of experience over the last few years (some of it pretty painful and personal) that this is not likely to be a problem. If it is, then we screwed up on accepting the original committers in the first place. * There is an implied assumption that a person's employer (and therefore their corporate email address) should have anything to do with whether or not that person is individually a good choice for being an Apache committer. THAT should be the overriding concern -- after all, they will be able to stay a committer even if they move to a different job (within the same company or elsewhere). * What happens to your "diversity" statistics if a committer that was originally outside the originating company is then hired by that company to continue working on the project? One of the company's goals might well be to support open source by allowing that person to work on the project on company time; yet your proposed standard would view the change of employment as a negative and not a positive. Apache is about individuals, not about companies. Apache is about attracting high quality software projects, not about conspiracy theories (go back in the archives a couple years before you joined, and you'll see LOTS of discussion along these lines :-). Diversity is important -- a proposal that ONLY has committers from one company needs to be analyzied. But a proposal that includes a software contribution from a company, but WITHOUT any committers from that company willing to continue working on the software (the "throw it over the wall" scenario) would also be problematic. Simplistic standards like "> 51% of the ACTIVE committership from a different company" might work for making simplistic decisions. They are not appropriate for a decision to accept a new project into Apache, which should be based on the quality of the proposed code and the proposed initial committers, not on the email addresses of the proposed initial committers. Craig McClanahan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
