New answers tagged contributor
1
It's generally frowned upon in open source culture to make contributions under what is essentially an anonymous identity. Contributions often require authentication mechanisms like SSH keys, and like a password the sharing of private keys among who knows how many individuals is a gaping security hole ripe for nefarious exploitation. Few open source projects ...
4
As mentioned in all previous answers, there is a difference between the author and the copyright holder. And this distinction usually is quite clear:
If a person contributes to a project with an e-mail address of joe.doe@example-company.com then it is - IMHO - very clear that example-company is the copyright holder while Joe Doe is the author who did the ...
7
The author of a work and the copyright holder of the work don't need to be the same entity.
An example of this is music - a song is written by an artist, but the copyright on it may be held by a distributor. We still credit the artist with creating the song.
When an employee writes code as work for hire, the employee is still frequently recognized as the ...
7
I'm a maintainer in various projects in GitHub with ~50 million weekly downloads but I am one person and can only share what worked for me.
Persistence.
The number one mistake I see people get is not set aside enough time to make a meaningful contribution, assume they're going to be awesome and then assume they failed when they don't get it right the first ...
16
There are two issues here:
Managing copyright and licensing of the company's contributions in a legally rigorous way, including corporate agreement to the project's CLA, if any.
The use of a single company account to interact with the project, used by multiple employees.
Copyright ownership of the code is completely separate from the display name of the ...
5
Management now has the idea to contribute via a more or less anonymous - or at least: not personal - company account,
I believe this could be illegal, at least in France (where I live and work), unless the physical person agree on not being mentioned. Since here the moral rights of a software developer as an author (even if he/she is paid to do that at ...
5
While it's true that a CLA by an individual employee would be of no use, I'd question the assertion that individual employees can't contribute under their own names - as you have yourself found, there are many examples of this happening out there right now. However, that's perhaps slightly irrelevant if your employer, for reasons of their own, doesn't want ...
5
Many good things have been written already in previous answers. One alternative that hasn't been mentioned yet: you can always fork a project.
You are unlikely to get anywhere forking a large project and working on it on your own, but if you find a stale project where the maintainer has gone silent, forking could be a success. If you actively maintain the ...
33
what is the best way to go about being an active, influential FOSS contributor?
The two goals I bolded that you seem to be asking about are quite different.
Many open source projects start because a person has a problem, and they want to share their solution with other people (the original developer is altruistic) as well as collaborate with others on ...
19
Most FLOSS projects are a kind of meritocracy: those who contribute(d) a lot, they have a say. The well-known projects are not new projects and especially the maintainers often work on them for many years.
Thus if you want to influence projects, you have to earn your standing with the existing contributors. You can only do that by friendly, on-topic ...
14
Be more of a team player. Comments like
There's always an "in" group that's running things about how the project works and aren't accepting of new ideas and innovations even if they are backed up with facts and statistics.
would really scare me off having you as a contributor on a project I ran - even if you don't say things like that directly, it's what ...
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