Here are the two fundamental and unalterable issues that are going to
cause changes to the forums.
On 9/6/2011 8:37 AM, Rory O'Farrell wrote:
On Tue, 6 Sep 2011 05:17:03 -0700 (PDT) Joe
Schaefer<[email protected]> wrote:
Sorry, but if this were put to a vote on general@incubator I'd
likely vote -1 as it is out of scope for the incubator to incubate
a non-software-development related group. Frankly we have no
business overseeing this work on anything more than a formal level
because we have no institutional experience with forums and their
management.
Do you then see no role for support for whatever project at the
unskilled (ordinary member of the public) user level within the
Apache structure?
Personally, I would love to see a community of services provided to end
users for Apache OOo. The purpose of Apache is to provide useful
software for the public good. Providing an end-user product without
some easy access to community-led end-user support is not useful.
If the Forum continues to provide such support for OpenOffice and its
various forks, including it is to be hoped the forthcoming Apache
version, which is the wish and intention of its Volunteer corps, is
there any mechanism whereby Apache might provide hosting faciltities,
with suitable disclaimers as to non liability?
No, Apache is not a hosting organization.
The fundamental issues requiring some sort of agreement or change are:
1 - The Oracle servers the forums live on are going away (someday).
Hence, the existing technical and organizational leaders of the forums
*must* migrate the code and content somewhere else.
This primarily needs folks like Terry and... who else? to start driving
the work, in conjunction with this PPMC and then Apache infrastructure.
I would expect that some technical changes are required when moving to
a new server, no matter where it ends up.
2 - The openoffice.org domain name is being transferred to the ASF.
Thus Apache will be responsible for content hosted there, and in that
case, we require that a (P)PMC have oversight and effective control of
the primary content hosted on that domain name.
Apache does not host content that is not owned by one of our projects.
There are ample third party hosting organizations for that purpose; our
purpose is to support our projects, as they are led by our PMCs.
Note that this is all my personal opinion. But fundamentally, unless
action is taken by several groups in conjunction, the forums will
disappear at some point in the future, which I think everyone agrees
would be a Really Bad Thing.
----
Note also that I agree with Joe's frustration with the lack of civility
on both sides of this equation. This, coupled with the poor job on the
Apache OOo side of communicating nicely how Apache actually works to the
forum side has been a serious problem for the podling.
What is the best *single* place for me to communicate with the primary
decision makers in the forums? Note that I prefer mailing lists but am
happy to use a forum when needed. (I say *single* place only because I
am unbelievably overbooked this week)
- Shane
