[csw-users] Fwd: Maintainer Verification

Eric Enright eric.enright at gmail.com
Fri Apr 14 20:16:15 CEST 2006


Hello,

The forwarded message is from a discussion on osol-discuss concerning
myself and the identity verification required of new Blastwave
maintainers.  As I mentioned in the thread, I am willing to work with
whoever/do whatever to get my identity proven.

Currently I am a part time Computer Programmer Analyst student at
Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, Canada and graduate this year. 
In the fall I will be (acceptance pending) attending The University of
Western Ontario in Computer Sciences.  I do currently work full time,
but in a non-technical field, and my employer likely doesn't care
about any of this.

I want to work with Blastwave because I depend on it for a number of
applications and libraries.  Most software I do build for myself is
linked against it, and I have seen mention at various times of others
wanting some of this same software built on Solaris.  Thus, it makes
sense to me to get it integrated.

So, what can we do?

Regards,
Eric



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dennis Clarke <dclarke at blastwave.org>
Date: Apr 14, 2006 7:41 AM
Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] Project proposal: Nevada Companion Software
To: Eric Enright <eric.enright at gmail.com>
Cc: casper.dik at sun.com, Stefan Teleman <stefan.teleman at gmail.com>,
opensolaris-discuss at opensolaris.org, Glynn Foster
<glynn.foster at sun.com>, phil at blastwave.org


>
> Twice over the past two years I have made attempts at joining the
> Blastwave maintainer community, only to ultimately be rejected because
> I do not have a "work email address" (I am a student (older student,
> far from a freshman)).  This was explained to me by Phil Brown as
> being for legal reasons, as employers are more responsible for the
> actions of their employees than educational institutions are.  Fair
> enough, this makes some sense to me, especially considering the
> setting of many Solaris installations.
>
> In that regard, there is /some/ exclusivity at Blastwave.  This rather
> put me off, since one of the projects has accepted patches by me in
> the past which provides Solaris support (Licq), and another one of the
> projects now lists packages created by me on their homepage (gtkpod).
> The latter even has CSW dependencies, and was created using modified
> cswutils scripts.
>
> This post is a bit offtopic, I admit, but "exclusivity" activated
> something in my brain like a keyword.  I am a happy Blastwave user who
> has been following most of this discussion.
>

Eric, this is a really tough policy.  It is tough to enforce and tough to
tell people, good people, that no, we can not have you building software
that will be running in the servers at Lockheed Martin, NASA and MIT.  The
issue of liability has been a very tough one but it was needed.

Let's consider the posibility that someone joins and claims to be a
programmer for company XYZ Inc.  In truth they work for no one.  We call up
company XYZ to confirm that they actually work there and then someone will
say "yes, they work here and we will put you right through."

In truth it is two people in the same room and their business is to destroy
servers with really nasty software.

So we have another stage of verification.  Someone must actually know this
person and be able to verify them.  Also a really tough policy to enforce.
I think we had a person in Germany that waited for a while before someone
could drive over to them and meet them.  We also had to say goodbye to
another valuable maintainer because he could not be verified.

Have there been exceptions?  Absolutely.  No one ever questioned Eric
Boutilier or Torrey McMahon (  http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/torrey ) or
Jörg Schilling.  But some measures, as I am sure you will agree, need to be
enforced to ensure safety and quality.

Clearly we need to look at your case again.

--
Dennis Clarke



--
Eric Enright



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