On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 09:01:22AM -0800, Stephen Lau wrote: > Joerg Schilling wrote: > > > > This sounds like a minssunderstaning of OSS development. > > > > In a real OSS project, people who contribute code have the right to > > decide on the future of the project. > > > > The current problem with OpenSolaris is that there is a self strengthening > > mechanism that prevents contributions and thus makes it hard if not > > impossible > > for people outside Sun to get into a state of being able to decide. > > > > > > Read my earlier threads. I was saying OpenSolaris is not a way to tell > Sun what to do with its distributions. Whatever Sun chooses to do with > Solaris, or however Sun chooses to run Indiana is Sun's business. > > People seem to misunderstand that.
Sigh. Let's please be clear what we're talking about. The code in the consolidations. The processes are variably open. ARC is pretty open. The ON C-team is pretty closed. Other C-teams are a mixed bag. Code review resources are available but not as well integrated as we might like. Direct access to most consolidations is missing. To get where (I think) we want to go, all C-teams need to be open both for interaction and membership, all gates need to be accessible, and the tools that support the processes need to be available and well-integrated. DUH![*] Sun's products. Not our business. They can do whatever they want with them. Hopefully they'll like what we're doing and use our work. Products created under our umbrella. Remains to be seen what the community role is in these. I suspect the right answer is what Herr Schilling has said: the responsibility for deciding what to do with them lies with the people who actually do the work. The product teams decide what kind of processes and internal governance they want. If the rest of the community doesn't like the result, too bad for us. We might as well do it this way because we cannot prevent people from taking our stuff and doing this anyway somewhere else. Everyone knows all this. I have seen little disagreement on any of it. So what do you want us to do? We could blow up all the CGs related to consolidations and form new ones that will use some incomplete, not ready for prime time tools on some infrastructure we don't have. I guess if you care more about making a statement of principle than making it possible for work to get done, that would seem like a good idea. Of course, it might also seem like a good idea if you think it would galvanise action around finishing the tools and building out the infrastructure, since no one could get anything else done until that happens. It could backfire, too; Sun could fork and we'd lose most of our contributor base. So flip a coin on this one. I don't like the risk/reward. So we're at the mercy of some infrastructure projects unless someone else comes up with a credible alternative. I hate that, too, and I hate that there's been so little tangible progress in nearly 3 years. Almost as much as I hate the constant stream of complaints THAT WE CAN DO NOTHING TO ADDRESS. Fix the problem yourself, suggest a fix we can help implement, or kindly remain silent. Don't assume we don't know or care about the problem just because we haven't fixed it by now. [*] Mr. Rockwood has (perhaps without intending to) suggested an alternative: that the consolidations be developed privately by Sun employees with little or no involvement from other members of the community, obviating the need for all this. While this approach acknowledges the relatively small number of people who can constructively contribute to some of the consolidations and could be achieved with no additional effort, it seems to ignore the fact that other consolidations will have broader appeal and that some of the contributions would be quite valuable even if few in number. So I do not favour this approach. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" Fishworks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
