On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 04:49:43PM -0800, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > The numbers speak for themselves. What is the point of having so many > CC's, if not to overwhelm the polls? I'm not saying that this was the > intention, but it certainly (to me at least) can have that *appearance*. > > Part of the reason I'm concerned is that I've had a belief that we were > basically running as a meritocracy. I'd be a bit unhappy if the core > technical leadership of OpenSolaris (both in and out of Sun) ultimately > got steamrolled in any kind of election because the Advocacy CG has > several times the number of CCs as the CGs where the actual "work" of > developing (and not just coding, but also tools, i18n, and docs) the > product occurs.
Welcome to the OpenSolaris Identity Crisis. Are we primarily a community focused on "world domination", or on engineering the best OS technology in the world? You can't really have it both ways; sometimes they're in conflict, and we're a democracy. There will always be more users than engineers, probably by several orders of magnitude. I'm coming to believe we ought to split the OpenSolaris Community, formally limiting the focus of one part to actual engineering work and creating a second one centered around advocacy, marketing, and outreach. The two sets of interests are not sufficiently well-aligned for them to coexist in the same democratic framework, even a confederation such as ours. I'm all for being inclusive; we shouldn't exclude anyone because he wants to engineer something different or new. At the same time, though, non-engineers shouldn't be allowed to dominate the processes that, ultimately, determine what integrates, how we define and present our technical strategies, and how we define our Community's output. And, while I think engineers are actually the best salespeople for their own products, I'm perfectly happy for SMI Marketing and their fellow evangelists to grow our work's mindshare without our direct input - anyway, giving them their own world in which to do so isn't much different from giving them 75% of the votes in a theoretically shared Community. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
