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

[Richard Esplin]

Rereading Peter's email, and doing some digging, I want to provide a brief 
correction to my last post. Though I agree we can do better, I don't think we 
did awful.

I see that Peter's contribution was called out in Kevin Roast's blog.

http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/kevinr/2014/06/27/alfresco-community-5-0-a/

And based on Peter's original email, it was correctly cited in the contributor 
list. (I haven't personally checked.)

I agree that we should have listed it in the release notes, but that has not 
been our habit in the past. I will propose we start doing that.

Is there some place where you feel we inappropriately took credit for Peter's 
work? How else do you think we should have given credit?

Thank you for the conversation. This feedback will help formulate our policy 
in the future.

Richard

On Thursday, August 21, 2014 14:23:54 Richard Esplin wrote:
> 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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