[OOTB-hive] Community contributions to Alfresco Software - Can OOTB make sure it is properly rewarded?

[Peter Löfgren]

I would like to bring up another topic where I think that OOTB can help
monitor the interests of the Community, and that is for Contributors to
Alfresco core.
There are two parts of this, one is that your code is used in open source
Alfresco, but it will also be used by the company Alfresco Software Ltd in
its commercial Enterprise edition and cloud offerings.

So what can one reasonably expect in terms of payments and rewards for a
contribution used by a commercial company? There are of course minor
contributions like a patch or simple code fix. But other times there are
more major ones, and for me this was the PdfJS viewer (created by me and
Will Abson) that are from 5.0 standard in Alfresco. For this I have not
received anything more than a mention in a blog post and listing in the
about box.

I must admit that I had no idea on what to expect, but I have for other
years at least received a free pass to Summit for my Community
contributions. This year nothing, and I understand that Richard only has a
certain number of free passes, and he has to pass the grace to others. I
agree on that when he has a limited numbers of free passes, there are some
great Community contributors that I agree this year must be rewarded.

I certainly hope this does not come out as being greedy or whiny, this is
not what it is all about. I can make a living out of selling services using
Alfresco Community, so I'm very well aware of that I'm already getting
something from Alfresco Software Ltd without paying them any. And in my
particular example we also for PdfJS viewer made use of an external library
pdf.js from Mozilla. So it is complicated who should be rewarded. It just
made me thinking of what the OOTB can do to help assuring the interest of
the Community Contributors to commercial Alfresco.

I do not know what is custom when a commercial interest make use of a
contribution. Maybe money never change hands. Or maybe I should have asked
for more. But there is other ways to reward that do now involve money. For
example a page listing official contributors, with a link to my web (good
for page ranks -> value), and easy when I claim to be a contributor to to
link to that page so it can be verified.
Along the line on this is a page on Alfresco Official website with this and
previous years Community Stars, little bit off topic for my post, but
something I see will bring value to those being acknowledged by Alfresco.

So can OOTB put up something on the web on what a community contributor
should require, recommended steps to take, and expect in return. Of course
every case will be unique, but I'm thinking establishing some sort of a
baseline.

Peter Löfgren, Loftux AB
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.xtreamlab.net/pipermail/ootb-hive/attachments/20140821/9fe41295/attachment.html>