That said, I've begun thinking over the past week or so that this
might be a weakness. One of the huge assets of open-source development
is that people can improve code. There have been a couple of times
when I've seen a problem and thought to myself, "I should really just
dig down into that, figure out what's going on, and see if I can make
it better." But then I remember that anything I come up with won't
make it into the codebase, and I just figure I'll work around it and
hope a committer comes up with a fix. Because the ratio of committers
to users is so small, I feel like tickets sit for longer in Lift than
they do in other projects. That may or may not be true, but it is my
perception.
I wonder if Lift might consider changing its policy on patches to
encourage people to post them so that others in the community who
aren't so worried about IP issues can benefit from them. Don't put
them into the project, so Lift's codebase remains pure, but at least
provide space for them to exist. In a way, contribution of patches
could be viewed as an application to become an official part of the
project. If someone posts enough patches, or a single patch that's so
useful to people that it demands to be pulled into the project proper,
then the person can be invited to sign the license agreement that
would make it possible to pull his/her code into the codebase. You
could even tell people that they shouldn't submit patches unless
they're willing to sign the Lift license agreement. Notice that you
don't have to make these people committers; once they've signed the
license agreement, a committer could apply their patches.
I realize this creates administrative overhead. Committers have to
review patches to find out who's worthy of inclusion, and someone has
to send out license agreements, make sure they get back, and archive
them. But I think the long-term advantages to the project would be
worth it. (Heck, I'll volunteer to be the administrative drone if that
helps.)
The final decision is obviously David's and if he thinks it's not
worth it, I respect that opinion. But I think there are tons of people
who will never be committers--they're just not visible enough on the
mailing lists and don't have the time to commit to Lift--who have
created improvements in the way Lift works that they'd be happy to
share with other people.
Todd
> --
> Lift, the simply functional web framework: http://liftweb.net
> Code: http://github.com/lift
> Discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb
> Stuck? Help us help you: https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/liftweb/Posting_example_code