sponsored vs volunteers

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Tue Apr 24 22:56:17 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 16:20 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > Bill Nottingham wrote:
> >> Rahul Sundaram (sundaram at fedoraproject.org) said:
> >>> In a simplied form: Whether you are paid to do some work in Fedora 
> >>> or not.
> >>
> >> Even if someone is paid to work on some part of Fedora, that doesn't 
> >> mean
> >> they're paid for all their contributions to Fedora. For example, I don't
> >> *think* that Red Hat is explicitly paying Jens to maintain Haskell 
> >> bindings
> >> for Gtk+.
> >
> > This is precisely why having a field with this information per package 
> > in the package database is useful.
> 
> This sounds like bloat to me.  While this is something we could do, is 
> it really something we should?
> 
I'm usually of the opinion that more information is better as long as it
doesn't compromise someone's privacy.  If this is optional information
it probably wouldn't violate that principle.  I could see this kind of
data being useful for things like:

1) Estimating how much of an investment companies besides Red Hat have
in Fedora.
2) Having figures on community contributors to post as part of a reply
to "Fedora is RHEL Beta".

Here's a stab at how this would work:

A package could be maintained by multiple people.  One might be paid to
do work on it but another would not.  So this needs to be part of a
person/package linking table.  We have a table that links
person->package-in-collection so that might be appropriate.

We probably want to track something more complex than a boolean;
sponsored by (self|Red Hat|Dell|Pogo|School District).

So adding a nullable field to the personpackagelisting table that
references a list of companies (updatable by users) is probably a good
first approximation.  (Another interesting thing would be to categorize
the organization so we could see which sectors are paying people to work
on Fedora but the more collected information, the more work a
contributor would have to do to enter it.)

One problem with this is that the owner is currently embedded within the
packagelisting (this made sense as every package needs to have one
packager that is the owner.)  The best way to change this is probably to
change this to create a personpackagelisting entry for every owner and
have the owner field in the packagelisting table point at that
personpackagelisting entry.

Rahul, if you'd like to put this on the list at the bottom of::
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/PackageDatabase

I can look at it in more detail later.  It won't hit before F7 unless
someone else wants to do the work, though.

-Toshio
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