Adoption by non-Mozilla projects?

[schumaml]

Hi,

came across contribute.json when I was testing https://www.gimp.org with the Mozilla Observatory (i.e. via https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Guidelines/Web_Security#contribute.json ).

Do you expect adoption of this standard by non-Mozilla projects?

And if a project did (or a critical mass of them), how would the data they provide be accessible to users - do you plan to offer a directory for arbitrary projects where users can search/browse/find projects?

[pmac]

Expect is strong, but I think we hope for adoption across the broader FLOSS world. A directory is something we've toyed with, and we do have a thing that uses contribute.json files for Mozilla webdev projects. There's also a Firefox addon that will notify you if a site has info at /contribute.json. We'd love to hear how it might be useful to others though.

[april]

@schumaml: Note that the Observatory doesn't penalize (non-Mozilla) sites for not having contribute.json. It is great if you do, though, and we hope to use it for all sorts of things in the future!

[schumaml]

Yeah, I'm aware of the non-penalizing aspect.

Got intrigued by the concept because figuring out a way to present all this information on a website always leads to the n+1th differently designed "How to participate!" page (or worse, pages). Collecting it in one file ensures maintenance at a single place.

Approaching larger umbrella organizations might be a good way to spread the idea, especially if they are currently implementing similar ideas. For example, Freedesktop has Appstream: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/ - less focus on getting participation info across, more focus on having things that you can find in software package management.

One issue I see there is that larger umbrellas might have a site structure of https://umbrellaorg/projectfoo|projectbar|projectbaz; handling this by one /contribute.json won't work.

[pmac]

One issue I see there is that larger umbrellas might have a site structure of https://umbrellaorg/projectfoo|projectbar|projectbaz; handling this by one /contribute.json won't work.

that is a good point. perhaps a primary contribute.json file at /contribute.json or /.well-known/contribute.json should be able to list URLs to sub-project contribute.json files?

[april]

I think that's a great idea. Maybe a projects object, like:

{
  "projects": {
    "Firefox": "https://getfirefox.com/contribute.json",
    "Thunderbird": "https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/contribute.json"
  }
}