James Carlson wrote: >Stephen Lau writes: > >>Darren Reed wrote: >> >>>To which I'd say that the board must be comprised of only those >>>who commit or make changes to the source code of opensolaris, >>>not those that are only involved in the ARC, website, etc. >>> >[...] > >>>Open source projects are fundamentally about code, everything >>>else is just window dressing. The right to be taken seriously >>>should be inline with the contribution to the source code base. >>> >>Which only sets up an even more elitist atmosphere. You would be >>eliminating the valuable contributions of people who are docs people, >>translations, artists, evangelists, etc. >> > >Indeed. >
The suggestion was an off-the-cuff remark. A more accurate pool of people from which to make up a board would be the contributors and core contributors combined as this should (I hope) include those who right documentation, etc. I see no reason why there should be any distinction between core and non-core contributors. But to this day, I've not seen any open source project dominated by "politicians" and thus I'd opine that to suggest that this would happen is not entirely accurate. Or to put it differently, if it did happen within OpenSolaris then it would be the first place it had and would make me wonder more deeply about where OpenSolaris is going. On top of that there are ways and means (like 1 or 2 year limits on terms, combined with limits on how frequently people can come back) to limit the attractiveness of using a position for political gain only. My observation of other projects is that people get "tired" of such positions after a period of time so the other issues become less of a concern than one might expect - especially since these offices are all pro-bono (and should remain that way.) >>There is nothing inherent about cutting code that somehow makes someone >>qualified to run or lead an open source project or community. >> > >I agree. > >Perhaps more importantly for this thread, though, I would like some >clarification from Darren on what he thinks are the existing >deficiencies in the OGB. In other words, I can't tell if he's >speaking in generic terms about all open source projects aside from >OpenSolaris, or if he has some clear complaint to be made about the >current membership. The wording seems deliberately inflammatory, >though. > The OGB doesn't appear to me to be actually doing anything. It appears more more like an arbitration council that also sanctions community decisions about which communities to create and how to make a contributor/core contributor. "So what". In this guise it feels more like a rubber stamp operation than anything meaningful. Darren p.s. Meeting minutes should always include the full name of all those present, not just first names.
