Committers for hire

Via Matthew and Steven: the Core Developers Network has been formed by mostly JBoss committers who have left the JBoss Group

The success of such a company will help the credibility of Open Source in people's minds, for sure. Hopefully they will get along with the JBoss group and not create a code fork.

I'm slightly worried about them saying ...we have partners with cvs commit privileges on other projects... on their front page. If having X committers in important projects is a measure of a company's value, committers elections might cause greater debate than they do now.

Actually, being a committer certainly has business value for many of us (it has for me as an independent consultant, for sure), that's not a new thing. Let's just hope that Open-Source service companies will not start trying to inject as many committers as they can in projects, so that a balance can be kept without company politics getting in the way (I have no reason to think that Core Developers will do any of this, it's just that the above mentioned phrase brought the idea to my mind).