This is a case (as I believe many real world cases will be) where it isn't clear that the proposed project fits entirely within an existing community. How do we prevent bugs in governance, bugs in the community organization, and misunderstanding by outsiders (and insiders) from preventing technical contributors from doing what they do best? I'd propose that every clause in the constitution should be rewritten or linked to/from a clause in an FAQ or (REQUEST:REQUIREMENT) -> PROCESS format. I think this change would be useful, it might help some Sun insiders accustomed to layers of internal bureaucracy to better understand new ways of thinking in the outside world and would be a good example of something OpenSolaris does better than other Open Source communities.
For example, think of an outsider trying to create and integrate a set of educational software into an educational OpenSource distribution. Is there an educational opensource community? No. How do I create an educational opensource community? (I'd guess you have to be a voting member and/or contributor to some other community???) How do I become a voting member? (It's somewhere in this thread, be recognized as a core contributer to some community) but since this proposal doesn't match any existing community, I'm still on the outside...) O.K. Now I have my community, how do I create a project? (It's described in legalese in the constitution, but really, how do I create a project?) I understand that most technical people who really want their project accepted in the OpenSource community will persist until some insider who thinks they understand the process du jour sponsors the project and pushes it through. But this early in OpenSolaris's growth we really afford to alienate any potential technical contributors who can just as easily decide to not bother porting their solution to OpenSolaris and instead port it to one of several hundred GNU/Linux distributions? James Carlson wrote: > Glynn Foster writes: > >> Including a list of leaders is easily doable, though I was worried that it >> might >> alienate the people who are keen to be involved - or those within other >> projects >> that are doing a lot of the work building the technology. If it's a necessity >> for an approval add Ian Murdock and myself. >> > > In that case, I'd suggest going to a group (such as 'install') or > other suitable mailing and looking for people interested in acting as > those initial leaders. I agree that you probably don't want to > alienate potential help by marching ahead with a project before > figuring out who the leaders are. > > It's not just that having some named leaders (with perhaps more to be > named later) is a "necessity for an approval," but that the project is > logically incomplete if there's nobody who is actually leading the > effort. It's just a bit of flotsam. > >
