[Cryptography] Open Source developer employment agreements, was: Cue the blamestorming

[Jason Cooper]

Ted,

On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 07:52:25AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 01:12:06AM +0100, ianG wrote:
> > 
> > Right now the dev team faces a dual pincer movement.  The volunteers are
> > too scared to make the radical changes that are needed to keep up with
> > developments, and the businesses out there are busily strip-mining the
> > team for developers.  This ensuring no independence and a facade of open
> > source, as we've seen with other notable corporate-controlled programs.
> 
> It would be nice if we could start instituting an industry standard
> that when a company hires a "core" developer for an open source
> project, they get to spend 50% of their time working on "community
> stuff".

It would be great if we could get an organization such as the EFF to
sponsor writing some template contracts.  A guide to negotiating such
percentages, and recommended brackets based on experience would be
a big step forward.

I think this would be beneficial not just to core developers, but also
to hobbyists, small projects, etc.  It would just affect the negotiated
percentage.

> That way, in addition to adding features that their company
> wants (i.e., smart cards, GOST algorithms so they can sell into the
> Russian market, yadda yadda yadda), there is also some time that
> people can spend doing the necessary code cleanup that a company might
> not otherwise be willing to invest engineering resources to do.

This is critical to folks who are increasing their presence in the open
source community as well.  They start out as hackers, scratching an
itch, gain experience, then get hired (a net loss for the community).

Something like the program mentioned above would help protect the
community's time investment in newer contributors.  It would also give
those same developers the most precious resource they need to grow into
core developers: time.

I also think this extends well beyond code cleanup.  Virtually every
open source developer I've ever spoken with has a (lengthy) list of
improvements, features, projects, and cleanups they simply don't have
time for.  I know I do [1], [2]...

thx,

Jason.

[1] http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=139223237824952&w=2
[2] http://marc.info/?l=linux-driver-devel&m=139562578413565&w=2