I just read about MySQL’s Quality Contribution Program (QCP) and I have to say it rocks! It’s a great way to build and maintain community.
Essentially, folks who submit bug reports, test cases or code patches get “QA Points”. When contributors reach a certain level of points over the past 12 months, they get a 1 year subscription to MySQL Enterprise Basic, Silver, Gold or Platinum.
I wonder if paying for (a varying level of) expenses related to a MySQL conference would be more of a “prize” :-)
Nice to see that MySQL’s list of leading community contributors isn’t stacked with MySQL employees.
Viewing the above list gave me a reason to revisit this JBoss “community” page. As best as I can determine, 44 of these folks work at JBoss in some fashion and the remaining 42 are not employed by JBoss. Maybe if Bill reads this, he’ll consider asking someone to list the 44 JBoss employees on a separate “JBoss employees” page? A group of great employees don’t constitute a good community. They may constitute a good company, but community takes more than that.
rand($thoughts); 
03.02.07 at 1:01 pm
Savio,
Thanks for letting JBoss know what constitutes a “good community”, that’s very much appreciated.
As you might be aware of, we have just hired Bob McWhirter as the head of JBoss.org. As part of this we will most probaly update our “community page” which currently focuses on the “JBoss AS” contributors (and other “older” projects) but do not lists more recent projects like ESB, Drools, jBPM, etc. But this requires time and focus, hence Bob and his team.
As for keeping employees on this “contributor page”, I certainly think it makes sense to keep them there, for two reasons. First because employees or not, they *are* contributors (not sure what your idea of Open Source is…). Second, because we only hire our employees (developers) as part of our communities (except when open sourcing a proprietary codebase obviously). Hence, all employees have been first and foremost contributors.
03.02.07 at 1:37 pm
Savio,
I agree – MySQL has a great idea here – but it’s not a new one. MSDN and dev2dev have done similar things before – but regardless, it’s kind of cool to see this popping up in the open source arena. I just wonder if a magazine subscription that you might be able to get for free will be enough of an incentive – I agree a pass to a conference would be better.
As for JBoss, the way that I see the community structured is that the “employed by JBoss” developers are actually part of the community – and I think it’s good that they’re listed on the community page. I think more companies need to realize that the best thing that they CAN do is have their employees be active in the community and be seen as active members – it not only shows leadership by example, but also fosters and grows the community.
IMHO ;) /LC
03.05.07 at 12:39 am
I think I like the JBoss system of a single class of access (everyone accesses the same version of JBoss, there is no “Children’s edition” and “Enterprise Edition”)
03.05.07 at 10:32 pm
@Sacha: I’m going to post a mainline response because I don’t want it getting lost in comments. PS: congrats on getting a Bob to work on the jboss.org side of your business.
@Lauren:
– Hey :-)
– MySQL is providing support subscriptions as prizes
– If you mean that a developer who works for example IBM, and contributes to Apache or Linux, should be highlighted as an open source contributor by IBM, then I agree. But if you’re saying that JBoss or MySQL should highlight their own employees as community members, then I disagree. To me, that’s the same as IBM having a page listing the key developers behind DB2 or WebSphere Portal Server.
– See more here
@Andy:
– We’re talking about community & governance more so than the products themselves. BTW, only paid customers get access to some parts of the JBoss portfolio (such as JBoss ON), and I don’t see a problem with that.
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