On Jan 8, 2008, at 2:42 PM, John Plocher wrote: > Joseph Kowalski wrote: >> Roy T. Fielding wrote: >>> I am not mistaken. >> Oh sigh,... > > I'm stuck in between - agreeing with both of you, and > disagreeing with both of you... > > On Roy's side, it is effectively true that OS.o communities and > their projects ultimately decide if/when to interact with the > ARC community. Just look at the user group community, which > has almost no reason to do so, or at projects that exist simply > to explore new ideas (website, PowerPC), or even projects that > are only prototyping and are not yet ready for even an inception > (like, ahem, most of Indiana).
Exactly. The community determines when ARC input is relevant and then the community makes a decision based on that input. > On Joe's side, there are several communities that have decided > that *the* way to get into their source repositories is to > follow the ARC process. These include Nevada/ON, SFW and X. Really? Are you sure that they actually decided that? Did they have a vote on their public mailing list and that vote was passed by a majority of the core contributors? If so, then yes, they incorporated the ARC process as part of their decision-making strategy. But it is the community that decided it, and the community can decide against it at some future date using the same decision process. It was not imposed from the outside. > The reason I am stuck in between is that the creation of the > larger OS.o community stalled before it was completed. The > basis for much OS.o (ON/Nevada) never was made into a real > community, SFW exists somewhere, but not anywhere I can find > it, the idea of Consolidations (which would be managed by the > ARC process) is still half baked, the OGB effort to define the > ARC role more formally isn't going anywhere, etc etc etc. > > *Of course* Roy and others can poke large holes in the story > because it really does leak like a sieve. Leak? It's more like a torrent. The story has effectively become a myth about the present (a.k.a., a bold-faced lie) that somehow separates the marketing of OS.o and the reality of Sun development. That's very sad, because my only justification for spending all that time on writing a constitution (and everyone spending so much time discussing it and setting up a process for ratifying it) was because the people doing the work actually wanted to work that way. You see, the problem I have is people keep telling me that "the community" has done so and so, or decided some such, and then I go out and find that this "community" has never actually been created by the OGB, has no facilitator, and doesn't even have a public mailing list for development. Bzzzt. Where's my reset button? > Welcome to the real world, where we all are human, yet we still > strive to make the best out of what we have. > > So, no, Roy - you can't claim that the ARC is always only > advisory (we've been there, done that - it ultimately > destroys the ability of the ARC to be effective at anything), > and no, Joe - there needs to be room in the structure of things > for people to simply play without strings. > > The middle ground is that, for the places where it makes sense > (OS.o consolidations, IMHO) we need to have a single technical > commitment process that can be used for all of them, one that > is staffed by (some of? all of?) the impacted Core Contributers, > and is answerable to the community by way of the OGB. > > We're not all the way there yet, but we are still committed to > making this work. Who's "we"? The difference between working as a collaboration and dictating decisions from a distance is very small in practice, but very large in terms of the impact on recipients. The constitution exists for the sole purpose of requiring the "we" to be real. It is either the truth or a lie -- there is no middle ground. BTW, Joseph, veto power is defined by the OS.o constitution and is almost identical to that used by Apache. ....Roy
