Re: [openstack-dev] Proposal to recognize indirect contributions to our code base
On 13/11/13 17:20 -0800, Stefano Maffulli wrote: On 11/13/2013 04:34 PM, Colin McNamara wrote: Not to be contrarian, but 92% of the commits in Havana came from non-individual contributions. The majority of those came from big name companies (IBM, RedHat, etc). ow, that's harsh. Despite what US Supreme Court Judges may think, Companies are not people: in the contest of this discussion (and for the purpose of reporting on development activity) companies don't *do* anything besides pay salaries of people. Red Hat, IBM, Rackspace, HP, etc happen to pay the salaries of hundreds of skilled developers. That's it. I happen to have started reporting publicly on companies activity because I (as community manager) need to understand the full extent of the dynamics inside the ecosystem. Those numbers are public and some pundits abuse of them to fuel PR flaming machines. Couldn't agree more! In the operator case, there are examples where an operator uses another companies Dev's to write a patch for their install that gets commited upstream. In this case, the patch was sponsored by the operator company, written and submitted by a developer employed by another. Allowing for tracking if the fact that an operator/end user sponsored a patch to be created further incents more operators/end users to put funds towards getting features written. I am not convinced at all that such thing would be of any incentive for operators to contribute upstream. The practical advantage of having a feature upstream maintained by somebody else should be more than enough to justify it. I see the PR/marketing value in it, not a practical one. On the other hand, I see potential for incentive to damaging behaviour. As others have mentioned already, we have a lot of small contributions coming in the code base but we're generally lacking people involved in the hard parts of OpenStack. We need people contributing to 'thankless' jobs that need to be done: from code reviewers to QA people to the Security team, we need people involved there. I fear that giving incentives to such small vanity contributions would do harm to our community. Agreed here as well. There's nothing wrong with small contributions but I can see them being abused. This is a positive for the project, it's Dev's and the community. It also opens up an expanded market for contract developers working on specifier features. I also don't see any obstacle for any company to proudly issue a press release, blog post or similar, saying that they have sponsored a feature/bug fix in OpenStack giving credit to developers/company writing it. Why wouldn't that be enough? Why do we need to put in place a reporting machine for what seems to be purely a marketing/pr need? +1 here as well! Cheers, FF -- @flaper87 Flavio Percoco ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Proposal to recognize indirect contributions to our code base
On 13/11/13 17:22 -0700, John Griffith wrote: On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 5:14 PM, Jay Pipes jaypi...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/11/2013 12:44 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 03:20:20PM +0100, Nicolas Barcet wrote: Dear TC members, Our companies are actively encouraging our respective customers to have the patches they mission us to make be contributed back upstream. In order to encourage this behavior from them and others, it would be nice that if could gain some visibility as sponsors of the patches in the same way we get visibility as authors of the patches today. The goal here is not to provide yet another way to count affiliations of direct contributors, nor is it a way to introduce sales pitches in contrib. The only acceptable and appropriate use of the proposal we are making is to signal when a patch made by a contributor for another comany than the one he is currently employed by. For example if I work for a company A and write a patch as part of an engagement with company B, I would signal that Company B is the sponsor of my patch this way, not Company A. Company B would under current circumstances not get any credit for their indirect contribution to our code base, while I think it is our intent to encourage them to contribute, even indirectly. To enable this, we are proposing that the commit text of a patch may include a sponsored-by: sponsorname line which could be used by various tools to report on these commits. Sponsored-by should not be used to report on the name of the company the contributor is already affiliated to. We would appreciate to see your comments on the subject and eventually get your approval for it's use. IMHO, lets call this what it is: marketing. I'm fine with the idea of a company wanting to have recognition for work that they fund. They can achieve this by putting out a press release or writing a blog post saying that they funded awesome feature XYZ to bring benefits ABC to the project on their own websites, or any number of other marketing approaches. Most / many companies and individuals contributing to OpenStack in fact already do this very frequently which is fine / great. I don't think we need to, nor should we, add anything to our code commits, review / development workflow / toolchain to support such marketing pitches. The identities recorded in git commits / gerrit reviewes / blueprints etc should exclusively focus on technical authorship, not sponsorship. Leave the marketing pitches for elsewhere. I agree with Daniel here. There's nothing wrong with marketing, and there's nothing wrong with a company promoting the funding that it contributed to get some feature written or high profile bug fixed. But, I don't believe this marketing belongs in the commit log. In the open source community, *individuals* develop and contribute code, not companies. And I'm not talking about joint contribution agreements, like the corporate CLA. I'm talking about the actual work that is performed by developers, technical documentation folks, QA folks, etc. Source control should be the domain of the individual, not the company. Well said Yet again, couldn't agree more! Best, -jay ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev -- @flaper87 Flavio Percoco ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Proposal to recognize indirect contributions to our code base
Stefano Maffulli wrote: On 11/13/2013 04:34 PM, Colin McNamara wrote: Not to be contrarian, but 92% of the commits in Havana came from non-individual contributions. The majority of those came from big name companies (IBM, RedHat, etc). ow, that's harsh. Despite what US Supreme Court Judges may think, Companies are not people: in the contest of this discussion (and for the purpose of reporting on development activity) companies don't *do* anything besides pay salaries of people. Red Hat, IBM, Rackspace, HP, etc happen to pay the salaries of hundreds of skilled developers. That's it. Furthermore, a ever-growing number of those developers actually work for the OpenStack project itself, with companies sponsoring them to do that much-needed work. Those companies have a vested interest in seeing OpenStack succeed so they pay a number of individuals to do their magic and make it happen. A lot of those individuals also end up switching sponsors while keeping their position within the OpenStack project. That's a very sane setup where everyone wins. So the fact that, according to your stats, 8% of people working on OpenStack are apparently unemployed (and I suspect the real number is much lower) doesn't mean only 8% of contributions come from individuals. -- Thierry Carrez (ttx) ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Proposal to recognize indirect contributions to our code base
On Mon, 2013-11-11 at 15:20 +0100, Nicolas Barcet wrote: To enable this, we are proposing that the commit text of a patch may include a sponsored-by: sponsorname line which could be used by various tools to report on these commits. Sponsored-by should not be used to report on the name of the company the contributor is already affiliated to. We would appreciate to see your comments on the subject and eventually get your approval for it's use. Rather than including this sponsor information directly in commit logs, the metrics tools could attribute specific changesets to a different organization. This would override the normal attribution that the metrics tools would otherwise make based solely on the committer's own affiliation. gitdm already special-cases some commits. For example, we do this to completely omit changesets that should not be counted towards contribution metrics, such as automated commits from Jenkins or translations [1]. Stackalytics has a similar mechanism [2], and activity.openstack.org (metrics-grimoire) may also provide similar functionality. This approach moves the recognition completely out of band from the git commit, and closer to where (presumably) it will be recognized by the community and the sponsor. Yet it would allows special attributions to be transparently documented and maintained by, and within, the community. Dan [1] https://github.com/openstack-infra/gitdm/blob/master/openstack-config/grizzly - the list of commit IDs in parentheses are omitted from metrics totals [2] https://github.com/stackforge/stackalytics/blob/master/etc/corrections.json - stackalytics provides for finer-grained corrections to specific changesets. ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Proposal to recognize indirect contributions to our code base
On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 5:14 PM, Jay Pipes jaypi...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/11/2013 12:44 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 03:20:20PM +0100, Nicolas Barcet wrote: Dear TC members, Our companies are actively encouraging our respective customers to have the patches they mission us to make be contributed back upstream. In order to encourage this behavior from them and others, it would be nice that if could gain some visibility as sponsors of the patches in the same way we get visibility as authors of the patches today. The goal here is not to provide yet another way to count affiliations of direct contributors, nor is it a way to introduce sales pitches in contrib. The only acceptable and appropriate use of the proposal we are making is to signal when a patch made by a contributor for another comany than the one he is currently employed by. For example if I work for a company A and write a patch as part of an engagement with company B, I would signal that Company B is the sponsor of my patch this way, not Company A. Company B would under current circumstances not get any credit for their indirect contribution to our code base, while I think it is our intent to encourage them to contribute, even indirectly. To enable this, we are proposing that the commit text of a patch may include a sponsored-by: sponsorname line which could be used by various tools to report on these commits. Sponsored-by should not be used to report on the name of the company the contributor is already affiliated to. We would appreciate to see your comments on the subject and eventually get your approval for it's use. IMHO, lets call this what it is: marketing. I'm fine with the idea of a company wanting to have recognition for work that they fund. They can achieve this by putting out a press release or writing a blog post saying that they funded awesome feature XYZ to bring benefits ABC to the project on their own websites, or any number of other marketing approaches. Most / many companies and individuals contributing to OpenStack in fact already do this very frequently which is fine / great. I don't think we need to, nor should we, add anything to our code commits, review / development workflow / toolchain to support such marketing pitches. The identities recorded in git commits / gerrit reviewes / blueprints etc should exclusively focus on technical authorship, not sponsorship. Leave the marketing pitches for elsewhere. I agree with Daniel here. There's nothing wrong with marketing, and there's nothing wrong with a company promoting the funding that it contributed to get some feature written or high profile bug fixed. But, I don't believe this marketing belongs in the commit log. In the open source community, *individuals* develop and contribute code, not companies. And I'm not talking about joint contribution agreements, like the corporate CLA. I'm talking about the actual work that is performed by developers, technical documentation folks, QA folks, etc. Source control should be the domain of the individual, not the company. Well said Best, -jay ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Proposal to recognize indirect contributions to our code base
Nicolas Barcet wrote: [...] To enable this, we are proposing that the commit text of a patch may include a sponsored-by: sponsorname line which could be used by various tools to report on these commits. [...] This proposal raises several questions. (1) Is it a good idea to allow giving credit to patch sponsors On one hand, this encourages customers of OpenStack service companies to fund sending back bugfixes and features upstream. On the other, it (slightly) discourages them to get involved more directly in OpenStack, and exposes company-specific information in a place where only individual contributors were exposed before. I'm not sure we really need to encourage sending bugfixes upstream. People who don't do it will lose in the end... So this is the smart move for them, and they should realize that. In summary, I see how adding this would be beneficial to the OpenStack service companies... not entirely convinced of the technical benefit for the OpenStack open source projects. (2) Is the commit message the right place to track this Commit messages may contain anything, as long as the reviewers accept it :) I'm slightly concerned by the use of (technical) commit messages to convey company-specific credits... but I agree that would be the most convenient place to track this. (3) Is this something the Technical Committee can actually mandate This obviously needs buy-in from the PTLs of the various programs, and by extension their core reviewer teams. We can definitely encourage them to accept commit messages containing that information, but unless we can come up with a good reason why this would make OpenStack technically better, I don't see us being able to enforce it across the board... -- Thierry Carrez (ttx) ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Proposal to recognize indirect contributions to our code base
On 11/12/2013 01:58 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote: This proposal raises several questions. (1) Is it a good idea to allow giving credit to patch sponsors On one hand, this encourages customers of OpenStack service companies to fund sending back bugfixes and features upstream. Does it? I'm trying to wrap my head around this topic since Nick mentioned it to me in Hong Kong. I am not sure that companies being serviced would have an increased incentive to upstream their code. I'd love to spend more time framing the problem as precisely as we can before heading down the path to find a solution. Why are customers of Mirantis, enovance, aptira, etc not willing to pay them to contribute patches upstream? /stef -- Ask and answer questions on https://ask.openstack.org ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Proposal to recognize indirect contributions to our code base
On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 8:20 AM, Nicolas Barcet nico...@barcet.com wrote: Dear TC members, Our companies are actively encouraging our respective customers to have the patches they mission us to make be contributed back upstream. In order to encourage this behavior from them and others, it would be nice that if could gain some visibility as sponsors of the patches in the same way we get visibility as authors of the patches today. I think this statement is a decent description of the goal, my paraphrasing would be reward upstream through recognition. But there has to be a better way than commit messages. We should also serve users better by perhaps indicating that a company they trust and partner with is ensuring OpenStack is all they, the users, want it to be. I agree the commit message is sacred but besides, users shouldn't have to sift through Gerrit patches. Also realize that there's research [1] about motivations for contributing to community work: reciprocity (I help because others help me) recognition efficiency (saves time) attachment or commitment to a group What about something with attribution in the docs for the feature? Can we play around with that a while? Attribution is going to have to be incorporated better into the docs for the CC By licensing anyway. Any thoughts on docs as placement for This feature brought to you by insert rewarded upstreamer here We need to play with the words more. Sponsored by brings up ickies for me, sounds like it turns others off too. Let's be careful with wording and placement both. Thanks, Anne 1. http://www.connectedaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/2001-peter-kollock-economies-of-online-cooperation.htm The goal here is not to provide yet another way to count affiliations of direct contributors, nor is it a way to introduce sales pitches in contrib. The only acceptable and appropriate use of the proposal we are making is to signal when a patch made by a contributor for another comany than the one he is currently employed by. For example if I work for a company A and write a patch as part of an engagement with company B, I would signal that Company B is the sponsor of my patch this way, not Company A. Company B would under current circumstances not get any credit for their indirect contribution to our code base, while I think it is our intent to encourage them to contribute, even indirectly. To enable this, we are proposing that the commit text of a patch may include a sponsored-by: sponsorname line which could be used by various tools to report on these commits. Sponsored-by should not be used to report on the name of the company the contributor is already affiliated to. We would appreciate to see your comments on the subject and eventually get your approval for it's use. Boris Rensky, Tristan Goode, Nick Barcet ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev -- Anne Gentle annegen...@justwriteclick.com ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
Re: [openstack-dev] Proposal to recognize indirect contributions to our code base
On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Daniel P. Berrange berra...@redhat.com wrote: On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 03:20:20PM +0100, Nicolas Barcet wrote: Dear TC members, Our companies are actively encouraging our respective customers to have the patches they mission us to make be contributed back upstream. In order to encourage this behavior from them and others, it would be nice that if could gain some visibility as sponsors of the patches in the same way we get visibility as authors of the patches today. The goal here is not to provide yet another way to count affiliations of direct contributors, nor is it a way to introduce sales pitches in contrib. The only acceptable and appropriate use of the proposal we are making is to signal when a patch made by a contributor for another comany than the one he is currently employed by. For example if I work for a company A and write a patch as part of an engagement with company B, I would signal that Company B is the sponsor of my patch this way, not Company A. Company B would under current circumstances not get any credit for their indirect contribution to our code base, while I think it is our intent to encourage them to contribute, even indirectly. To enable this, we are proposing that the commit text of a patch may include a sponsored-by: sponsorname line which could be used by various tools to report on these commits. Sponsored-by should not be used to report on the name of the company the contributor is already affiliated to. We would appreciate to see your comments on the subject and eventually get your approval for it's use. IMHO, lets call this what it is: marketing. I'm fine with the idea of a company wanting to have recognition for work that they fund. They can achieve this by putting out a press release or writing a blog post saying that they funded awesome feature XYZ to bring benefits ABC to the project on their own websites, or any number of other marketing approaches. Most / many companies and individuals contributing to OpenStack in fact already do this very frequently which is fine / great. I don't think we need to, nor should we, add anything to our code commits, review / development workflow / toolchain to support such marketing pitches. The identities recorded in git commits / gerrit reviewes / blueprints etc should exclusively focus on technical authorship, not sponsorship. Leave the marketing pitches for elsewhere. +1000 Regards, Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o-http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :| ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev ___ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
