FOSS developer interfacing

[Baylink]

Perhaps I just haven't looked deeply enough in my [[Copious Free Time]], but is there a roadmap somewhere for prospective outside developers, both of the code, and of whatever process may so far have been formalized for assigning bugs to and accepting patches from non-Zimbra employee developers?

All projects do this differently, so it doesn't seem productive to guess, and perhaps Captain Obvious will jump up and slap me with the clue bat... but it doesn't seem worthwhile to do a lot of patch work that won't get accepted into the mainline, either... or to be working on integrating something the wrong way, when the development team already has A Plan.

[dijichi2]

Speaking as a complete outsider, I guess/suspect that they probably accept code if it is a) usefull & well written, and b) good for / in the interests of zimbra. I think there has been community contributions, although I suspect probably more in the peripheral areas. I'm about to submit a fairly invasive patch for Solaris and FreeBSD support, so we'll see how the process goes

I think the roadmap is pm.zimbra.com. I guess if there's a bug there you want to fix, submit a patch and/or ask for ownership of it?

[Baylink]

I've seen PM, yeah, but that doesn't get me all that far inside the architect's head, which is the requisite. Some projects like this are really open to outside development (which looks like the only way I'll get accomplished a lot of what I want because, apparently, people who have been running email for 25 years and are on 20 mailing lists are not Z's target market :-), and some, only at gunpoint.

I suppose when one of the devteam trips over this message, we'll see which sort they want to be.

Some help from the inside guys is pretty much a prereq here, though; the pile of intake necessary to make any traction is *massive*; worse than Firefox, I suspect, and that's the all-time champeen, so far...

[Rich Graves]

Well, you need to start with the Zimbra Contribution Agreement. Some of your questions are answered therein, and if you find the terms of the agreement objectionable, there's your answer.

As even more or an outsider, my impression is that the pace of Zimbra development has been so fast and tight and the build environment so complex that there hasn't been a lot of room for outside developers, i18n work and unsupported os builds like dijichi2's being the main exceptions. The contributions of french translators in particular weren't integrated nicely (see flames in the forum), though serious effort seems have been put into addressing that more recently.

To their credit, Zimbra does use version control and bugzilla religiously and openly, with very few bugs marked private, almost always because private customer data has been attached as test cases. For outsiders, the choice of perforce for version control has been problematic, but it's working better than it used to. I understand and agree that perforce has been terrific for internal developer productivity, and has much to recommend it over cvs/svn/git.

[Baylink]

Well, according the forum rules, you have to sign that to *post here*. No, really, Go re-sign up as a new user and check.

But seriously folks.

I know why they do that, and it's not the same reason GNU does. And I'd be ok if they'd just admit in public that the reason is cause they need to be able to dual license what you contribute so they can make a living off it.

Given that they're now, well, *Yahoo*, I'm slightly less worried about their making a living, but still...

[jholder]

Well, according the forum rules, you have to sign that to *post here*. No, really, Go re-sign up as a new user and check.

Hi,
Just so there isn't any confusion, that's not entirely accurate. It doesn't say that you have to sign the contrib agreement to post here, but that posts are subject to the contributor agreement.

Now, I don't particularly like that phrase, and will be removing it here soon. Thanks for pointing it out.

[Baylink]

"""
All posts made in the Zimbra Community, including but not limited to Forums, Blogs, Gallery, Bug Tracking, and Contribute, are subject to the Zimbra Contribution Agreement. By accepting the terms of registration for Forums and Bug tracking, you also accept the terms of the Contribution Agreement.
"""

For my purposes, there's no difference between "signing" and "agreeing to", which is what it requires.

But I continue to be unhappy about the handwave in the agreement about *why* you need it; if you're rewriting it, why don't you just come out and say what you mean?

Look at what SCSL bought Sun.

The people you're trying to attract will read the handwave and wander on to some other mor deserving project; I'm pretty sure that's not your goal.

There are plenty of OSI approved OSS licenses that aren't the GPL.