Properly stated origin of code contributions

[Simon Peyton Jones]

|  I believe the GHC project should consider setting some reasonable
|  ground-rules for contributions to be on the safe side in order to
|  avoid potential copyright (or similiar) issues in the future, as well
|  as giving confidence to commercial users that precautions are taken to
|  avoid such issues.

I agree with that. We could list the policy on https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/WorkingConventions, or a page linked from there.

One possibility would be to add a "Contributors" section to the GHC Team page https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/TeamGHC, and ask anyone submitting a patch to add an entry describing themselves (including their real name) to that page.  By "contributor" I means someone who is submitting a patch but is not yet a committer.  We could have separate sub-pages for committers and contributors.  

That would give a way to celebrate contributors, as well as a way to identify them.

Simon

|  -----Original Message-----
|  From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of
|  Herbert Valerio Riedel
|  Sent: 30 October 2014 08:13
|  To: ghc-devs
|  Subject: RFC: Properly stated origin of code contributions
|  
|  Hi,
|  
|  GHC's Git history has (mostly) a good track record of having properly
|  attributed authorship information in the recent past; Some time ago
|  I've even augmented the .mailmap file to fix-up some of the pre-Git
|  meta-data which had mangled author/committer meta-data (try 'git
|  shortlog -sn' if you're curious)
|  
|  However, I just noticed that
|  
|  
|  http://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/commitdiff/322810e32cb18d7749e255937437
|  ff2ef99dca3f
|  
|  landed recently, which did change a significant amount of code, but at
|  the same time the author looks like a pseudonym to me (and apologies
|  if I'm wrong).
|  
|  Other important projects such as Linux or Samba, just to name two
|  examples, reject contributions w/o a clearly stated origin, and
|  explicitly reject anonymous/pseudonym contributions (as part of their
|  "Developer's Certificate of Origin" policy[1] which involves a bit
|  more than merely stating the real name)
|  
|  I believe the GHC project should consider setting some reasonable
|  ground-rules for contributions to be on the safe side in order to
|  avoid potential copyright (or similiar) issues in the future, as well
|  as giving confidence to commercial users that precautions are taken to
|  avoid such issues.
|  
|  Comments?
|  
|  Cheers,
|    hvr
|  
|   [1]: See
|  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Do
|  cumentation/SubmittingPatches
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