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

[Mark Reinhold]

> Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:27:26 -0700
> From: Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com>

> On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 15:44, ulf.zibis at gmx.de wrote:
>> Am 27.03.2009 22:49, Martin Buchholz schrieb:
>>> It's too difficult to give credit to external contributors.
>>> One problem is that the Contributed-by: line is a red flag to
>>> lawyers and other folks that might cause the legality of the change
>>> to be questioned without end.  Let's try to get Ulf a proper commit bit
>>> and make sure the legal questions come to an end.
>> 
>> Aren't "Contributed-by" and "author" comments usual practice in open
>> source products?  Even in Sun's JRL source author was mentioned. I
>> think, the lawyer guys and girls from Sun should rethink that subject.
>> Ok, we will see ...
> 
> 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 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.

- Mark