[Replies to ogb-discuss]
Unlike national elections in most countries, in OpenSolaris-
land we don't have political parties, caucuses or endorsed
platforms; nevertheless, there is something I think we'd all
agree is one of the most important goals for this year:
Repair the relationship with Sun and empower our Community.
So, what's wrong with the relationship?
As I said in an earlier email, I believe that it was
naive of Sun and the OS.o community to think that it
was either possible or desirable to transition quickly
from "closed Solaris" to an "open Solaris completely
independent from Sun" as described in the Constitution
and the "about OpenSolaris" page.
I also think there was a misunderstanding about what
Sun desired when it launched the community (in part)
to encourage developers to adopt and use Solaris. My
take is that, while there *is* value in getting more
kernel, driver and utility developers contributing to
and porting the (open) Solaris operating system, there
is significantly *more* value in having a whole undivided
ecosystem based on a compatible set of distributions,
where application developers, university students,
custom distro builders and users are all able to take
advantage of each other's work.
Put these two things together, and you can see Sun's
predicament. Sun *wanted* a community that empowered
application developers, but *got* a community aimed
squarely at kernel hackers. Whether you see this as the
"kernel.org -vs- Ubuntu" fight, or the "fully open -vs-
MySQL model" argument, in my opinion, it all is simply
a reflection of the above mismatched expectations.
How do we fix it?
These two views aren't incompatible. The ecosystem
built on the foundation formed by ON's "kernel.org",
and the MySQL development model are simply places
on the transition path from closed Solaris to open
Solaris.
I believe that fixing the problem is a matter of
resetting expectations and building honest and open
communication paths between Sun and the community so
that disconnects like this do not come up again.
As an example of how Sun and the community can work
*together* on controversial issues, I've spent the
last several months working with vocal and opinionated
community members (both non-Sun and Sun) as well as
Sun decision makers (executives, marketing and legal)
to create a set of proposed guidelines that spell out
the different ways the OpenSolaris community wants to
be able to use the OpenSolaris trademarks. We aren't
done yet, but we have reached a place where everyone's
voice is heard, everyone's opinions are valued and,
while we still may disagree on minor points, we have
forged agreement in the most important areas.
The new vision for the Community seem obvious to me:
While Solaris started out closed, and the community
was bootstrapped as a source tree + "kernel.org",
our long term goal is to be *more* than simply a
place to hack on code or being a kernel provider
to the world - we want to create a vibrant
ecosystem around OpenSolaris compatible operating
systems and applications.
How do we empower our community?
That's where you come in :-) I'd like to start a
dialog between the candidates and the membership that
focuses on the explicit and actionable things that both
the OGB and the Community can *do* to reinvigorate
themselves.
Let's choose to *not* focus on rewriting the charter
or constitution right off the bat. We've seen what
happens when we write the rules *before* we know what
we are doing. This time, let's get things working
first.
Here's a couple of topics/activities that show my biases:
1. How can we work with Sun management and Sun engineers
to make the infrastructure accessible outside of Sun
so that we can start working as a community. We all
know the litany: Mercurial, rti-tool, bugs, ARC tools,
the webapp and jive, but talk is cheap. The hard part
is figuring out how and where the community and the
OGB can effectively engage and help make this happen
when many of the issues are Sun-internal.
2. What do we need to do to get the OpenSolaris repository
ecosystem bootstrapped, deployed and filled with an
initial set of packaged applications? Nobody wants
to waste all their time arguing about governance, so
why not redirect all that energy towards putting
packages into the repos?
-John
