James Carlson wrote: > OK; I see the point. I suppose I don't see the outcome as the same -- > the likely result of just "doing something" is that other things will > be piled on later without much regard to whether or not they fit or > make sense, because, human nature being what it is, nobody sane will > want to reopen this box. > > I'd expect ARC-and-consolidation-as-project-with-benefits to continue, > which argues against bothering with User Groups. May as well not fix > that one, either.
I think that's perhaps slightly pessimistic. Note I'm not suggesting that discussions around consolidations and ARCs should stop, quite the contrary. However I anticipate that the consolidation and ARC discussions will take some time to come to fruition, in the meantime there is still useful work that can be done. > In comparison to the pre-OpenSolaris model, communities had no formal > basis. Perhaps they were management organizations or department > numbers. Or they might have been mostly-open mailing lists. They had > neither the structure nor formal role that they do in the OpenSolaris > model, which is why I'm calling them ahistorical here, and hard to > understand with respect to long-existing structures. > > I'm not saying that they're unwelcome or that they don't serve a > function, but rather that they sort of dropped from space, leaving > OpenSolaris participants to fumble over what they mean. You seem to be suggesting that Sun's internal structures were the inspiration (? ;-) for the OSO structures. I don't think that is correct, my understanding is that the OSO structures were more inspired by the way other open source communities organised themselves, specifically the Apache community. Personally I can't see why they can't work well for us as well. > Then why bother with the User Groups proposal? It seems a bit random > to me to fix one known problem and give a pass on the others. "Eh, > good enough" can't be an OGB motto, either. :-/ I'm not saying that we shouldn't fix the other problems, but I am saying that we shouldn't wait until we have "The Great Plan Of Everything" before we make a start. The proposal on the table deals primarily with *existing* structures and how we move them forwards. At present we don't have structures in place to represent consolidations or the ARCs, and for that reason I'm saying that we should concentrate on fixing what we already have, and then add the stuff to support consolidations and ARCs when we have decided what we want. -- Alan Burlison --
