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