On Feb 11, 2008 11:02 AM, Cornelius Schumacher
On Monday 11 February 2008, Francis Giannaros wrote:
On Feb 11, 2008 10:29 AM, Cornelius Schumacher
wrote: I would suggest to use "core member" or "core contributor" instead. This captures the fact that the people who get opensuse.org addresses are the core of the project and still doesn't exclude anybody from feeling as a member or contributor to the project without formal recognition.
I simply don't think this confusion arises as much as you are suggesting;
Well, I was confused, and I think a couple of others as well.
If there is no perfect term, then there will certainly be some people that are confused. Since the amount of confused people seem to be so few, and other terms seem to be even more problematic, it seems like the best solution. We can just hope to be perfectly clear in our definition of the term so that when a confused person does come (honestly, I think this is quite rare), there won't be a problem. I think it's defined quite well on the first couple sentences of the page: "openSUSE, being an open and global community project, has contributors and volunteers from all over the world. "openSUSE Members" are specifically distinguished contributors who have brought a continued and substantial contribution to the openSUSE project." Do you agree?
So when you talk about being a member of openSUSE, it implies the project as a whole.
Which is absolutely fine, in my opinion.
I also don't think the word itself implies it. "Core member" would, however, be even more confusing as it's used completely differently in other OSS projects
Really? Where is it used completely differently?
Most open source projects. Like I said, "core contributor/developer" generally refers to people working on the _core_ part of the project. For example in KDE where you work, a core developer might be someone who i.e. hacks on kdelibs, whereas we don't want to restrict openSUSE members to this core part only. We want translators, supporters, and contributors of all kinds to be in theory eligible.
(whereas plain "member" is -- to my knowledge -- only used in a way similar to this, successfully), as I mentioned before.
Member is certainly used informally at a lot of places when people are referring to members of a project. In a formal way it's usually only used when there actually is a formal organization where you can formally be a member of.
The former is almost certainly rarer than the latter, particularly in open source projects (i.e. ubuntu), which is why I think this confusion rarely arises. Kind thoughts, -- Francis Giannaros http://francis.giannaros.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org