Source code openness and Ubuntu bounty projects

[Paul Sladen]

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006, Jung-woo Sohn wrote:

Hello Jung-woo

> My question is as follows. When you engage in any bounty projects, does
> the source code need to be kept open all the time

Generally bounties are for GPL'ed code at the end, so the code needs to be
open and available at then end.

> can it be closed until the project completion?

Sometimes it can be fun to keep things hidden and then surprise everyone
when it suddenly 'lands' at the end of the project.  "Landing" large amounts
of code has its downsides and is generally frowned upon by upstream
maintainers.  The release-early, release-often approach is better 9 times
out of 10.

The compromise is generally to keep everything open but to limit knowledge
of the project by only publicising the URL's to the people that are closely
involved with the out-come of the project---this ensures some degree of
better testing and lets the other interested and knowledgable people flag up
any likely integration issues before they happen.

For the Summer-of-Code students, there is an encouragement to keep the
in-progress working code in a publically available Bazaar tree so that the
mentors can quickly review the progress in the project and make suggestions;
as well as providing a useful audit log of the bounty.

	-Paul
-- 
High on a Spanish mountain, surrounded by howling dogs.  Brussels, BE