On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 8:57 PM, Rich Teer <rich.t...@rite-group.com> wrote: > On Thu, 8 Jul 2010, Ian Collins wrote: >> Is the OGB still active? > > *Crickets chirping* > > Hopefully, the silence is a sign that they are in deep conversation > with Oracle's OGB liason and that most of the content of such talks > is hush-hush. I'd prefer a little more transparency, but I guess > that's not how Oracle operates... :-(
I'd have to say the OGB is alive, but on life support. We have been contacting senior Oracle management and talking to them about the devastating impact their continued radio silence is having on what used to be a vibrant open source community, but every place we turn, we hear the same mantra: Oracle's senior management has not made up its mind as to what to do with the OpenSolaris developer community, so the company officially says nothing at all - and because it is Oracle's HR policy to prohibit any non-official comments about unreleased products, the end result is that nobody at all can say anything at all about OpenSolaris. Our community was chartered because both Sun and the community were committed to "open and constructive development and dissemination of [a subset of the Solaris Operating System's] code base". The OGB, in particular, was created to "to manage and direct an OpenSolaris community in its efforts to improve upon and advocate in favor of OpenSolaris, so that the community may long endure". Since Oracle bought out Sun, we've seen their commitment to the above dry up almost completely. In the 3 months since this OGB took office, we have had no Oracle/OGB Liaison, no Oracle employees on the OGB, no Oracle website support for our new constitution, no community driven distro, and no real communication between Oracle and the OGB. The ARC cases for Indiana were held in closed session, the distro that bears our name has been AWOL for 3+ months, and many of the senior [Open]Solaris engineering leaders were RIF'd or have since jumped ship. Not a pretty picture at all. >From my perspective, without Oracle's commitment to the above ideals, we aren't the same community we were when we were chartered: we no longer are in an open source "Solaris" development partnership with Oracle and we obviously don't have any skin in the game with Indiana and the OpenSolaris distro - and the OGB can do nothing to change the situation. While we *might* fork off and do our own thing or become just another Oracle User Group (part of the "World's Largest Community for Developers, DBAs, and Architects, providing services and resources to help developers, DBAs, and architects build, deploy, manage, and optimize applications using Oracle products and industry-standard technologies"), I'm pretty sure that none of these options are what I signed up for when I joined this community... So, yes - *Crickets chirping* captures the essence of the conversation pretty well, I'd say. Opening this up, from your perspectives out in the community, what options do you see for us, both as an OGB and as an open source development community? The OGB meets virtually on Mondays, 8am-9am California time; please call in and let us know what you think the Board's position (if any) should be on this topic. http://wiki.genunix.org:8080/wiki/index.php/2010_07_12_OGB_Agenda -John _______________________________________________ ogb-discuss mailing list ogb-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/ogb-discuss
