I expect Andrew's response will differ little from others.
The blessing and curse of open source work lies in the lack of budgets and authorities. Even if OpenAFS could constrain development/standards/miscellaneous effort it doesn't appear to be practical. In a paid organization constraining a given effort can be decided in favor of reallocating the freed resources, driven by mandate and the golden rule (the 'who has the gold makes the rules' variant.). In a purely volunteer arena, constraining an activity in favor of another may simply lose resources instead of accomplishing a desired reallocation. I'm not sure how open source organizations function in this regard. Do tasks need sponsors? Is there any authority to say 'we will do these things, and not these others?'. Is effort only constrained by what people are willing to do/submit? The idea of working on one standards document at a time is interesting. Taking it as an example, it seems that the probability of its success lies in agreement among confederates. Late to the party I'm sure, but the idea of allocating resources is quite different in all-volunteer organizations. I have of late wondered about the future of AFS, and wished for a corporate owner so direction and resource allocation could be focused, but have mostly lamented the lack of marketing. I watch organizations make significant investment in technologies that are inferior -- from companies that have sales and marketing budgets. Kim ________________ [email protected] 970-215-6359 On Aug 29, 2012, at 5:24 PM, Andrew Deason <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 29 Aug 2012 12:48:17 -0600 > Kim Kimball <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I hear that "we can't" ... "we must" >> >> Perhaps we can evaluate this: "... or are desperately-needed >> functionality that can't afford to be blocked on standardization. " >> >> What is the desperately needed functionality, and for each such item >> what is the desperate need? > > "Desparately needed" is defined extremely differently according to > different organizations, and can be conflicting. It is difficult for me > to even begin to answer that question for myself, let alone arrive at > some agreement between everyone. > >> If OpenAFS could deprioritize some number of functionality related >> tasks, would resources devoted to those tasks really be reallocated to >> standardization? >> >> Can OpenAFS currently identify people who would gladly work on >> standardization but are currently blocked on functionality tasks? > > These are good questions. I have another one. Should the standards group > try to prioritize and limit the scope of existing standards work? In > thinking about this, I wondered about the possibility of trying to get > everyone to work on _one_ document until some consensus point is > reached, and only then are new documents even proposed. Normally I would > think that doing something like that is prohibitively slow, but I find > it hard to believe that anyone involved in the standards process right > now would be significantly slowed down by that. > > I mean, given the low level of activity, we are spread pretty darn thin. > >> What do we need to know, factually? What resources can OpenAFS count >> on? Does/Can OpenAFS agree on priorities? Who's working on what >> right now? If tasks were reprioritized, who would actually volunteer >> to work on standards tasks? Is it possible to list/name >> tasks/priorities/resources? > > If you're talking about OpenAFS development, it's not nearly coordinated > enough at the moment to answer those questions (not that it needs to be; > I don't think large open source projects generally are). If you restrict > this to standards-related work, then maybe that is feasible. > > -- > Andrew Deason > [email protected] > > _______________________________________________ > AFS3-standardization mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/afs3-standardization _______________________________________________ AFS3-standardization mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/afs3-standardization
