On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 10:38:10AM +0200, Olivier Berger wrote: > I think Ohloh.net provides, for instance an interesting comparison to > your proposal (see my profile for instance [0]). In case you didn't know > it, I suggest to check its features for inspiration. While I agree with most of what you said, I feel the need of a warning before taking ohloh too seriously as an inspiration. In my experience, ohlog has severe privacy issues: I once wrote them saying that they were misrepresenting my work skills and politely asking to please not show any information about my online persona, and they basically replied telling me to fuck off. They didn't use the f word, but they have been just as offensive. We must not assume that, since there are public logs of VCSes or uploads available for one's Debian work, then the person contributing to Debian cannot have some reasonable objections on how that data is processed and displayed, especially when processing changes the meaning of the data somehow. For example, if I uploaded a package at 9pm yesterday, we can safely assume I'm happy that the world knows that I uploaded a package at 9pm yesterday. But we cannot, for example, assume that I also meant to publish information about when I usually do Debian work, or when I'm usually at home, or whether I like to do work or have fun during Italian national holidays. Similarly, if me and you commit patches to the same project, we don't necessarily mean to tell the world that we are friends, or coworkers. Suppose we had jobs at competing companies, and there were a nice page, easy to find in Google, that said "enrico@magnets4u.com and olivier@allaboutmagnets.com are friendly working together!" just because we both commit to a software that's used by both our companies: first thing, we'd be expecting a call from our bosses, which might or might not be able to understand the logic of what's really going on. Recklessly exposing too much information outside the context in which it was published can in some cases turn people away from contributing. If ohloh were actually being taken seriously by people in my professional circle, I would probably have to consider going through the extra trouble of not using my real identity while contributing to Free Software. We do not want that. Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org>
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