java-nio-charset-enhanced -- Milestone 4 is released

[Mark Reinhold]

> Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:27:41 -0700
> From: Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com>

> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 21:51, Mark Reinhold <mr at sun.com> wrote:
>>> Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:27:26 -0700
>>> From: Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com>
>>> The problem is more human.  One would like to give credit for good
>>> ideas or good analysis, but the only official way to give credit in a
>>> commit message is via a simple
>>> Contributed-by: email-address
>>> which raises legal doubts even when there is no copyrighted material.
>> 
>> Exactly what sort of legal doubts do you have in mind here?
>> 
>> We already require the contributor of any nontrivial change to submit an
>> SCA prior to that change being integrated.  Is that not sufficient?
> 
> I am worried about:
> - contributions that do not require a copyright assignment,
>   e.g. an excellent bug report

Bug reports submitted to bugs.sun.com, to bugs.openjdk.java.net, or in
e-mail to an openjdk.java.net list are covered by appropriate Terms of
Use (ToU) statements.  Are they not sufficient?

> - contributions from a Google employee, because of repeated institutional
>   amnesia that Google has a blanket SCA, which is not reflected in
>   https://sca.dev.java.net/CA_signatories.htm

I'm not sure why that is, but I'll look into it.

>>> I guess one can abuse the Summary: field to squeeze in thank-yous,
>>> but it's pretty obvious that you are circumventing the process.
>> 
>> Perhaps -- but if we need to fix the process, then we can do that.
> 
> It seems that for changes for which I have an external contributor,
> there is a large variety in the nature of the contribution;
> sometimes an off-hand remark will cause an avalanche of work on my part.
> The nature of the collaboration cannot
> be expressed in the commit comment.  Perhaps we could have
> a Thank-you: with free-form content in addition to a Contributed-by:
> with the latter reflecting a legal copyright author to keep the lawyers happy.

You seem to think that the Contributed-by line exists in order to keep
Sun's lawyers happy.  It doesn't.  Sun's lawyers actually know nothing
about it.

We defined the Contributed-by line in order to give credit to non-author
contributors in a visible and permanent way.  We could equally well have
called it the "Thank-you" line, but we didn't.

As a changeset author you're free to list anyone whom you think worthy of
credit in the Contributed-by line.  Is the problem here that you assumed
otherwise?  If so then we just need to improve the documentation.

> Speaking of which -- hopefully jcheck will soon be open-sourced?!

Yes.

- Mark