Le 11/22/12 12:55 AM, Ted Dunning a écrit : > Presumably the company required that the person doing the work commit > this work or cause this work to be committed to the project. That > seems like the person agreeing to this is crossing their wires a bit > since Apache contribution is supposed to be on an individual level > (although there are plenty of examples of partisanship masquerading > as personal initiative).
Although I do think that such a contribution should always be discussed, and approved, openly before being accepted and done, in many cases the company (or public organisation) is just trying to get some guarantee that the work will be endorsed by the community : this is the only way for such additions to be supported by the community. There is a large shift those days compared to what it was 10 years ago in the way OSS is used : there is a large consensus in gov organizations that using OSS and even contributing to OSS is a big plus. One month ago, for instance, the French prime minister published a letter [1] (well, it was more than a letter, it was a directive) pushing toward the mass adoption of OSS in *all* the French civil services, and this includes spending 10% of the IT budget to actually *support* OSS and private companies that work on OSS. When you know that the French gov spending represent 55% of the French GDP, just do the math... Such collaboration, support, and if need be, contribution, requires that they are endorsed by the communities. That mainly implies they pay external people to add some new features, but they also require that some mention of such 'contribution' is done. This is a complex situation, and we may have to think about what it implies for The ASF. IMHO, such contribution is really different from those made under the umbrella of a private company, where *many* of the current contributions are done so far. [1] https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/french-guideline-favours-use-free-and-open-source A mostly complete translation in english is available here : http://pad.april.org/p/translationayraultcircular -- Regards, Cordialement, Emmanuel Lécharny www.iktek.com
