On 04/09/11 17:22, Simon Phipps wrote:
On Sep 4, 2011 5:14 PM, "Rob Weir"<[email protected]> wrote:
Another thing to note is that the existing forum volunteers do not
"own" the support forums. They do not operate autonomously.
Are you sure? I believe they do.
+1 to Simons view -1 to Rob.
AFAIK, A Sun admin has logged onto this services maybe half-a-dozen
times to install the base O/S and Coolstack years ago, and no "Oracle"
Oracle-employed admin has ever done so. Coolstack is years out of date
for this reason. I (assisted by Drew in the early days) do all of the
root admin as well as run the Forums.
They have always been autonomous from the OOo project organisation
hierarchy. The initial decision to allow their creation in the first
place was more of a Sun one than an OOo project one -- as the project
didn't see the need to have a working User Community and Sun did and
provided the box for us to run our service on, though in later years the
project came to value the role that the forums have played.
So from day 1 the forums have always been autonomous. And one key
driver here was so that the community could have the freedom to
up-sticks and take their knowledge elsewhere should the relationship
break down -- our primary allegiance and service duty is to the end-user
community, and not to a development project. The last friction was over
the whole issue of whether the forums should continue to support
non-Oracle variants such as LibreOffice, which it did and still does
against some then strong Oracle opinions.
I think that both Drew and I have said this on a number of occasions.
To demand that the community unilaterally surrender such autonomy
without reasonable engagement is a pretty sure way IMHO to force them to
consider the "new home" option. Despite all of the hassle over the last
few days, my preference would be to vote to stay, but I am only one
voice in what I think is currently a minority opinion.
