Money for Bugzilla development [was: [off-topic] ...]

[Joel Peshkin]

David Miller wrote:

><snip>
>
>My main concern with that kind of idea is I don't want to wind up with some
>outside company winding up making policy for Bugzilla by way of saying "we
>paid money for this, so this is how it's going to be."  It would be more
>like that if someone were paying me to work on Bugzilla because then I
>would need to do what they were paying me to do, which might not line up
>with the project goals... I guess in a way I just don't want the current
>core group to lose control of Bugzilla.
><snip>
>
This should not be a problem so long as any developer under contract 
keeps at arm's length from direction decisions.  This is simplest in 
cases where a company hires a programmer to do a task.  If the task is 
done in a manner consistent with the team's directions and of a quality 
that passes review, the patch can land.  If not, it stays as a patch 
used on certain sites only.

When members of the core group are under contract, this gets more 
complicated because it creates a conflict of interest.  It becomes 
important that memers of the core group uninvolved in the contract make 
the decisions.

We went through this a few times already.  During the development of the 
wildcard patch, I recused myself from the final review of the work done 
by an employee of mine.  During Zippy, Dave didn't try to land the 
horrible things he had to do to get Sybase to work :-)

The team itself need not be for sale just because some of its members 
work for hire.  If we want to make sure of this, we should work out some 
policies to give individual members some guidance on the subject.

-Joel