Earlier this week two issues were opened in the Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ repo to help begin the process of obtaining consent from contributors to relicense their work under the GPLv2 and MPLv2 licenses. I appreciate everyone’s quick responses on both of those issues, but understand that both raised some concerns that I would like to address here. The first is a concern with the amount of notifications from the contributor agreement issue and the second is a concern with emails listed in the confirming commit authors issue. Apologies to anyone negatively impacted by either of those issues as that was certainly not the intent.
There was consideration for alternate routes of gathering consent such as Google Forms, Google Sheets, a markdown file in the repo, and a standalone website but none offered the transparency and simplicity as a GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issue. While prior Make/Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. posts on the proposal and next steps for dual-licensing Gutenberg did mention the planned use of GitHub issues to gather consent from contributors, those posts could have been more descriptive in their plans. In aiming for transparency and simplicity there were unintended side effects of adding noise into your daily lives with the GitHub notifications. I apologize for this negative impact to you and any other unintended consequences.
There was also consideration for directly emailing or Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. direct messaging to gain confirmation on potentially unknown commit authors, but these options were dismissed in favor of a GitHub issue to allow for transparency and simplicity in the process. In sharing emails from the publicly available Gutenberg repo’s git log there were concerns that this opened those people up for spam and other unsolicited emails. While those email addresses were already publicly available, I recognize that we made them more readily accessible and apologize for any negative impact this has on those individuals as a side effect of our attempt to transparently handle the process of confirming commit authors.
Again, it is worth repeating that I appreciate everyone’s quick responses on these issues and I apologize for anyone negatively impacted by them. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please utilize the comments on this post and I will work to ensure they are addressed.
Props to @jeffpaul for drafting and reviewing this post.
