On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 07:30:15AM -0400, James Carlson wrote: > There is as yet no appeals path for ARC decisions that involves the > OpenSolaris community. There certainly should be, and the path should > go to a community group and then (if unresolved) up to the OGB. As > was done the first time an appeal was needed inside Sun, I suspect we > will likely end up designing this process when we need it. > > However, despite your email address, you're a Sun contractor. You do > have a defined appeals process available to you. That is to convince > a DE or Director to support an appeal to SAC (ARC chairs).
While that's true, it's not apparent (to me, at least) that the result of such an appeal is binding on anything other than Solaris (more properly, Sun products). That is, a successful appeal to SAC could result in permission to make a change to a Solaris consolidation but not an OpenSolaris one. I suppose that if the chairs of ARCs which are not open to non-Sun membership abstained from participating, it would then be reasonable for us to accept their decision. If that's what we want to do, we should formalise that policy. Alternately, the OGB might, upon a separate appeal, consider the SAC or other Sun-specific decision on something like an amicus curiae or foreign precedent (depending on who submits it) basis. In any event, while Joerg is welcome to appeal to the OGB, I'm not interested in overruling the ARC on technical grounds, nor do I think we should grant exceptions (Jim's case 3). One of the great things about OpenSolaris is that it frees us from meddling managers and pressured project teams who want to do the wrong thing because they've been handed some ill-conceived deadline or tasked with implementing an outright misfeature. Not only are the results technically unacceptable, this invariably ends up costing the company far more than whatever fleeting advantage we obtain. So it seems to me that everybody wins by disallowing these exceptions or at least severely penalising them by forcing Sun to fork in order to grant them. An appeal based on the ARC failing to consider all the information might be more acceptable, but I must say that the record in this case does not appear to support that conclusion. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
