> Ian Murdock wrote: > >> On 5/31/07, Alan Burlison <Alan.Burlison at sun.com> wrote: >> >>> > The level of beaurocracy in OpenSolaris exceeds what I've seen >>> > in any other open source group by an order of magnitude and >>> > is a facet of life at Sun that we seem to have carried over from >>> > Solaris to OpenSolaris, for better or worse. >>> >>> I agree entirely, that mirrors my thoughts too. >> >> >> Holy crap yes.
On Thu, 31 May 2007, Darren.Reed at Sun.COM wrote: > There's one further thought to add to this and that is for > someone who wants to do something "fun" with their spare > time, dealing with all of this is very unattractive. > > Imagine if some high-school/university computer geek were > to come along and look in on opensolaris-discuss, does anyone > here actually think that they would be attracted to the project? > > Maybe OpenSolaris is trying *too hard* to be the perfect > open source community. > > More source code and less comments/opinions! But now imagine that you're offering the knowledge, wisdom, and experience of a group of veteran developers to the aforementioned high school or university student. As long as you're making that available in a way that helps them learn and accomplish, and not using it to shut them down before they get started, that's a fantastic opportunity. And now read Bryan's excellent response: > > More source code and less comments/opinions! > > Yes, please. I don't think one can necessarily fault the OpenSolaris > community for being bureaucratic; if a project wishes to lead with the > process and follow with the prototype, life will naturally feel very > bureaucratic. I (rather strongly) believe that this is _not_ the way > that software should be developed; in software, ideas are expressed in > _code_ -- the implementation _is_ the idea. If an idea has not been > implemented, it is (in my opinion) premature to call it an "idea" -- it > is rather a notion, a daydream or perhaps a fancy. If one has such > a thought, the first order of business is not to send out proposals or > give speeches or navigate through process but rather to sit down and > write some code: build a prototype, share it with some like-minded > people, incorporate their feedback, expand the community (note, > lowercase "c") and iterate. If one does this and one's ideas are sound, > the process (in my experience) naturally follows; people naturally > gravitate to good ideas. > > This is not to say that the OpenSolaris processes can't be used to help > this process of iteration -- just that they should be used to help the > process, not initiate it. If going through the rigmarole to start a project or community is required BEFORE doing anything useful, then we're abusing processes, and using them to stifle activity. If we're using the process appropriately, to help refine ideas or implementations through application of collective experience, then we're using the processes appropriately, to make things better. Any review process, be it ARC or c-team or OGB/project instantiation, can be used effectively to facilitate progress, or it can be abused to stifle creativity. For a well designed and implemented process, the distinction will never be clear on paper, because it's largely a function of how all participants approach the issues. For a process that doesn't dovetail with the way a community works, though, the distinction will be clear. It will always be cumbersome at best. Is the goal of this process to foster creative development? Or to protect OpenSolaris resources from abuse? Or to proactively prevent the proliferation of what is, essentially, noise (as opposed to signal)? It is inevitable that followup will be inconsistent, based on many factors. Some ideas will atrophy, others will become obsolete before they are implemented. Some efforts will be duplicated by folks that don't know each other, or who fail to reconcile different points of view. But those are problems that must be solved after they occur, not before. You don't tell someone "you may not blog, because we don't think you'll do a good job of providing information worth consuming, or we don't think you'll follow through with regular updates." You let everybody and their brother start a blog, and you stop reading the ones that are useless. If the resources associated with providing useless blogs are found to be scarce or precious, then you come up with a standard or criteria or process to reclaim them. Seems like projects should be similarly vetted, with value of contribution recognized and rewarded somewhat organically, rather than by mechanical barriers to initial startup. --Mark
