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

[Richard Esplin]

I completely agree with this feedback.

It should have been called out in the release notes and the blog post.

I do not yet know who made the decision to include PdfJS, or why it was not 
communicated to have been a community contribution.

But it was likely one or two engineers working on their immediate task. They 
were asked to improve the viewer, and they improved the viewer. If they 
communicated to their leader how it was improved (by leveraging a 
contribution), the leader didn't take the time to record it and pass that 
information to the documentation team who create the release notes.

That explanation is not meant as an excuse. I agree that we messed this up. 
But hopefully it helps you understand how it happened.

Thank you Peter and Heiko for raising this concern. This is a really clear 
example I can use with my team to educate them.

My apologies,

Richard

On Thursday, August 21, 2014 22:06:46 Heiko Robert wrote:
> Hi Richard,
> 
> thanks a lot for your feedback and your engagement. I don't want to
> speak for Peter but give you a feeling what customers think about
> Alfresco already using this feature long time with the addon from Peter
> and Will. I'm sure he is pretty aware what he is doing when he chooses
> Apache license. The first statement from one of our customers: "Wer
> hat's erfunden? LOL (who has invented it)" - this is a funny quote from
> a german commercial for swiss cough candys convicting a poser saying he
> made the best drops. So it's not just the communication to the
> contributor - this behavior is also bad marketing from Alfresco to the
> enterprise customers.
> 
> It's more or less not what Alfresco mentions (or leaves out to mention)
> but the way you do it. Since we do not adorn ourselve with borrowed
> plumes, we would like to get straight here:
> If we did not develop the soup, we shouldn't announce it as ours... I
> can't belive it was a descision of a single developer to integrate the
> addon without any mention to the developer and to put it as a new
> feature on the release note and blogs that way.
> 
> Let's work on it.
> 
> Heiko
> 
> Am 21.08.2014 20:06, schrieb Richard Esplin:
> > For Alfresco to accept a contribution, we need rights to re-license it for
> > inclusion in Enterprise Edition. We either get those rights by making sure
> > code we use is already licensed under a liberal license (Apache), or by
> > getting a contribution agreement.
> > 
> > When you release your code, you should make sure that the license you pick
> > supports your goals.
> > 
> > I agree that our engineering team needs to get better at working with
> > contributors. Our team often duplicates work that the community has
> > already
> > done. I hope I can help Alfresco to accept more contributions, and be more
> > proactive in communicating with contributors. The way to achieve this goal
> > is through education and cooperation.
> 
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