Hey,
Here's the latest meeting minutes. I have the mp3 available, but not had a good
enough connection to upload yet. Will do soon and follow up.
Glynn
==
OGB Meeting Minutes :: 13th February 2008
OGB: Alan, Ben, Casper, Glynn, Rich (:5), Steve
Others: John Plocher, Simon Phipps, Al Hopper, Bill Franklin
Absent: Keith
1) OpenSolaris Membership Meeting
Alan didn't see any other responses to Keith's draft about the meeting.
Glynn commented that the biggest issue was the secretary was supposed
to give an official list of Members 10 days before the election. Glynn
added that there was still a few Community Groups who haven't provided
their lists yet, but were in the pipeline.
Alan commented that we had missed the dates from Keith's email, so we
needed to set new dates. Ben proposed a date of 1 day before the vote.
Alan asked if nominations could be accepted prior to the meeting. Glynn
replied that sending nominations to ogb-discuss seemed to work well
last year. Ben questioned how effective the meeting would be with so
many voices, and suggested the meeting get immediately postponed having
achieved quorum. Ben added that the meeting would simply state who
was nominated, and give the possibility for people to object if
necessary.
Glynn suggested a deadline of the 18th for final grants, which brings
us up to the 28th for the start of the meeting. John asked if there
was any pushing a constitutional amendment to change the need of
a meeting. Simon added the point of the members meeting was to have
a members meeting, not necessarily just for the election, to allow them
to discuss what's happening in the community rather than a free for
all mailing list discussion. Simon added that he expected to have a
rolling IRC meeting over several weeks.
Ben asked what the current count of members was. Steve counted
576 unique members. The constitution requires 1/3 quorum.
Alan proposed a motion to adopt 28th February as the Membership
meeting.
ACTION: Glynn to contact Dan Price and ask about web IRC
functionality on the OGB community webpages, automatically
connecting to #opensolaris-meeting.
ACTION: Glynn to set up the IRC channel, and organize logging.
ACTION: Glynn to announce the times and dates of the
Membership meeting.
ACTION: Glynn to mail notifying Community Groups of the last
opportunity to update the grant lists.
ACTION: Glynn to mail ogb-discuss, opensolaris-announce announcing
that nominations and constitutional amendment proposals
are open from Monday 18th February.
2) Trademark Comments
Rich was rather surprised that there was a lack of comment on the
mailing list. Al suggested that people had accepted the inevitability
of the situation. John added that it was clear before the holidays
that it was probably clear this was going to be the answer.
Bill commented that he would like encourage the community to get
involved in the discussion and contribute to the guidelines. Al
commented that he believed Sun had played a masterful political
game, to put off and difuse the situation until people calmed down.
Glynn asked what the next steps were, what the timelines were likely
to be and what was the decision making process. John added that he
was trying to bootstrap the discussion, but felt that no one was
pointing out gaping holes. He commented that he would be happier if
more people were participating. Glynn asked if there was anything
that the OGB could do to encourage this. Bill commented that they
had outlined issues where Sun needed careful control from a
trademark perspective, but added that he'd like to understand where
people wanted to use the mark a little more.
Glynn commented that he would like to see a number of small
focused committees to discuss this, much like the GPLv3 drafts,
and iterate on drafts. John added that the trademark and branding
discussion alias is that forum. Glynn added that it wasn't obvious
who was driving the discussion, and where ownership laid. Alan
suggested getting the distribution developers together. Glynn added
that a user advocacy focused group would be helpful to ask questions
about use of the mark during their meetings, or as fan buttons on
the webpage. Bill suggested that 2 other focused groups would be an
application developers group, and a sys admin focused group that
would care about certification. Alan added that service providers
might also be a good option. Simon added that each of these groups
would most likely have a separate policy, rather than one monster
trademark policy, and likely to have different timelines in terms
of creation. Simon suggested that a policy to help groups like
Joyent could use the mark, along with user groups was most
important right now. He added that most distributions were already
using the mark under a fair use policy.
John commented that there was already a policy available for the
user groups that have been out there for a while. Ben clarified
that the Joyent issue was no longer an issue, given that OpenSolaris
had been re-worked to be Indiana. Simon suggested that there was
still likely to be uses outside the distribution alone, and there
was still discussions to be had before you could jump to that
conclusion. John summarized that the team would need to look at
the differences between a Nevada based product, and an Indiana
based product.
Alan asked if there was any hope in finding people interested in
participating in those focus groups. Glynn questioned if there
were issues in people knowing how to participate, and that
focused groups may help that. John requested that the OGB
members feeling strongly about it should take the lead - if
no one felt strongly about it, nothing would happen. Bill added
that John's strawman proposal was already agreeable with Sun,
and emphasized that trademark law was about control of quality,
nothing to do with the code. Bill commented that he would be more
than happy having Tiki Dare, Sun's trademark lawyer, to attend
a public meeting and explain some of the issues. Al suggested
that an FAQ would be useful. John added that genunix's current
use of OpenSolaris was agreeable under the fair use policy. Bill
emphasized that Sun wanted to continually encourage this use.
