On 11/03/2012 09:47 AM, Harry Burt wrote:
I believe I was told that, for the purposes of (say)
Gerrit, contractors
(and potentially full employees) were advised to use personal email
addresses in order to provide continuity of their account once they had
ceased to be contractors/employees.
?
Gerrit and GitHub allow you to add more than one email address to an
account, isn't it?
I thought it was a good practice to contribute code from the email
address of the employer that is paying you for doing that work. It
leaves things a lot cleaner for the contributor, the employer and the
OSS project in terms of attribution, legal & IP. With +5M LOC around,
long term projects and continuous developer hiring, I wonder whether a
bit of consistency wouldn't be useful.
It also helps the developer being clear on what contributions are done
as part of his/her job and which ones are done as purely personal projects.
When contributing to upstream projects (in this case non-MediaWiki
projects), using the
mediawiki.org address also helps to make clearer
the contributions of the Wikimedia orgs as such. You ave probably found
yourselves in the situation of finding that some
redhat.com,
hp.com or
whatever.com/org dude is committing a patch in some upstream project,
and how good that feels. It can't be bad to generate this type of
impression to developers and contributors of open source projects out there.
It did of course make my code review
analysis -- which required users to be labelled either as staff or
non-staff -- a little tricky.
That too, and we have now this situation with the metrics reports. We
get many times the question of WMF contributions compared to
independents / 3rd parties and as it is now this is very difficult to
calculate.
Anyway, I don't have an agenda here. :) My main point especially on
email addresses in code contributions is simply whether the WMF has
considered or agreed on a guideline.
--
Quim