I think that is wonderful history. Thanks Terry. It also makes me wonder whether we, here, have any right to claim any authority over those forums than the folks there grant us, including any change to the terms of use that will occur (once again).
I am reminded that the strongest partnership is one sustained by common interests and shared commitment, and no penalty for dissolving the relationship. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Terry Ellison [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, September 04, 2011 09:54 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Dissatisfaction amongst the community admins, moderators and volunteers 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 Coolstack is years out of date for this reason.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. [ ... ]
