I've got to be honest with you, there have been lots of "whats wrong?" discussion, they started during the pilot. Frankly I believe that most of them are fundamentally flawed. This is inrooted in the core of our community which formed from two distincts groups: a) Sun employees who have the inside view, have been frustrated by constraint or disagreements or politics or whatever, and want to use this new avenue to address what they belive to be important; and b) Sun/Solaris enthusiasts (commonly called "developers" whether they are programmers or not) who wanted to be part of the process for years but couldn't be and largely felt snubbed by Sun for years.
These two groups are, in my opinion, the core of our community. To date these groups haven't been able to work well together because group A has years of experience with "the system" (politics, code, history, organization, etc) and group B does not but regardless has goals and personal desires. One fundamental problem is that we're trying to build an "open" community when most of us don't come from that background. The F/OSS crowd tend toward ad hoc rule, the "old guard" tend toward order, process, etc. This all makes sense, really. Those at Sun with a history have seen things come and go, work and fail, and gained experience that those of us on the outside haven't. The SCM choice was a great example. Folks on the outside wanted to adopt standardized tools, namely Subversion. Folks on the side wanted something close to Teamware, that would be migrated to without breaking existing internal standards, etc. A thorough investigation was made, discussion and debate ensued, and ultimately the tool that best fit the needs of Sun was chosen. And so here we can get into the flame war, some people will state that Hg was just the best SCM period, others would debate that SVN is the "standard" tool loved and used widely and better serves them. I'm not passing judgement, just framing an illustration. But ask 10 people "Who made the choice on the SCM? The community or Sun?" You'll get differing answers. Until all 10 people say "The community!" we have a problem. (Trolls aside.) Questions of "control" are an issue we repeatedly deal with... but to be honest, this isn't really _the_ core problem. The core problems, imho, are: A) There isn't a lot of enthusiasm! Not many folks are really fired up, going out and sharing the news, blogging, etc. There isn't a whole lot of grass roots evangelism happening outside of group B above. Yes, Group A is out there too but having a Sun badge hurts your credability in the evangelism game. This is why I don't work for Sun... I can do much, much more outside than in. B) There are too many distractions! We've got tons of projects. We're dealing with an entire f**king operating system! I'm on 10 different lists, I'm affiliated with dozens of projects and communities, I'm a core contrib of several, and there are just too many buckets that need to be filled to keep up with it all. Then you have to follow OS-Discuss and OGB-Discuss on top of it? How does anyone keep up? The answer is that no one does. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing... and worst of all, it doesn't give a crap. Using myself as an example, my job revolves around OpenSolaris and I can't keep up! If I can't, if the Sun engineers can't, how do we expect anyone to? C) We don't have efficient avenues of communication. I've been behind Podcasts and such for a long time now. I still have intentions to start one up but with all the in-fighting I would be afraid I'd have to gloss over so much as to not make us look bad to the outside world. The roll ups were a good idea but those are extremely time consuming (God Bless Eric). Projects and Communities are fanned out but perhaps poorly organized dividing out community into small chunks. The keys to success are, imho, to improve communication such that people can actually feel informed (instilling confidence), streamline the organization such that there actually is some (I've advocated strong communication between OGB and Communities so that there IS control... most Communities have no idea how to act, what to do, and are isolated groups, which started this thread in the first place, the SA Community has had the same problems), and to rally around at least a set of unified goals that we're all pushing toward. Sun execs still have the ability to impose change without the consent of the community or the OGB. This will, realistically, always be with us, but until we at least _believe_ that the OGB has control its a wet rag. Where are we going? What is our purpose? The community is made up of people watching, waiting, and commenting on whats coming out of "Sun" or they are part of Sun working on the issues. There is no community ownership here.. there isn't even really the illusion of it. OpenSolaris is the koolest fucking project on the net, has the best fucking technology around, and some of the brightest fucking people in the industry (Sun badge or not). Untill people stop worrying about this nit or that and worry more about how to do some kool shit with this awesome community and code that we have we're screwed. And that should be painfully obvious. To be honest, I'm strongly considering adopting a campaign to dual license GPLv3 for no other purpose than to light a fire under this rocket. The existing alternatives are.... not pleasant. I hope that Indiana will be the fire we need but its so far only divided us further.... and why? Because were focused on things other than how to do something fucking awesome. I agree that the Summit will be a pivotal event in the history of our community... we're going to band together as never before or... well, we'll keep doing what we're doing and more drastic measures will be called for. Thats my opinion anyway... and it's not a new one. benr. John Plocher wrote: > Ben Rockwood wrote: >> This sounds like flame bait to me. > > Sorry - it wasn't intended to be, though on re-reading it, > I can see how it could be taken so. Let me try again, with > the --verbose flag set :-) > > IMHO, OpenSolaris needs thought leaders with vision who are > able to make things happen - people with a "startup ability" > who can identify and fix the hard problems*. It doesn't matter > to me whether they are OGB members, Core Contributers in > a community or simply thoughtful and respected email and > blog authors; the success of out OS.o community depends on > having them. > > My fear is that our /inability/ to address these hard > problems today is burning out those leaders, and that > one of the reasons they are having trouble being effective > is that our governance structure makes it a virtual > certainty that controversial proposals (like the ones > needed to fix the hard problems) will be shot down. > > In dealing with cross-cultural teams, one of the things that > always seems to surprise the participants is when they > "discover" that some of their basic assumptions aren't > really shared - things like > > o Do you assume that silence implies consent? > - or disapproval?, > > o Are things permitted unless forbidden? > - or forbidden unless permitted? > > o Does every decision need consensus? > - or is it OK to make a decision that is > unpopular to some? > > o Are you comfortable assuming control? > - or is it natural to delegate to others? > > Many of the governance disconnects we are having seem > to be to be reinforced by these sorts of fundamental > mis-assumptions. > > Getting together in person - with beer - to build > relationships is one way to start addressing these > disconnects. With such relationships in place, it is > much easier to constructively disagree and yet still > make progress towards mutually acceptable solutions. > > The upcoming summit is one place to build those > relationships. No matter what you may think about > Indiana, it is worth attending. > > -John > > ____ > [*] A partial list of hard problems that IMO need > to be addressed: > > Community cleanup, > Consolidation/Community/Project/ARC relationships, > Sun-owned infrastructure, tools and processes, > The role of Sun engineers -vs- fear of "Sun in control", > A common vision for OS.o - are we kernel.org -vs- a focused > distro like Ubuntu and/or can we be both, > The implications of having a majority of community members > with no interest in governance, > ... > >
