James Dickens wrote:
this isn't about grunt work, its about who controls the gate, and sun
endorsing this person and his project above the rest of the others.
This sounds more like a "glossary cache miss" than evidence of a conspiracy.
The role of a gatekeeper is very different in the FOSS and Sun worlds,
primarily because Sun's ARC/development process.
In the FOSS world, the gatekeeper is usually[1] one of the key maintainers,
and their role is to make decisions about the evolution of the component.
Many times, those decisions are in the form of allowing or disallowing
certain changes/patches/commits based on the gatekeeper's own technical
or ideological desires.
This is part of being a gatekeeper at Sun, but with a twist. Their core
responsibility is to make sure that all proposed changes have been accepted,
but the gatekeeper him/herself is not the one that decides what is acceptable.
Instead, it is the community, in the forms of "a business or strategy group"
and "a technical or architectural group". The gatekeeper simply checks that
both types of approval have been given BEFORE the changes are allowed to be
integrated.
How might this play out in the OpenSolaris community? My take:
The part of the community responsible for steering OpenSolaris answers
the "do we want it?" question (i.e., the CAB sets a governance process
which in turn sets the boundaries and values used to come up with the
answer for any particular (proposal, community) tuple...)
The ARC part of the community answers the "is this the right way to
architect this change?" question.
If the community response is "yes we want it and yes it is done in the
right way", then and only then would the gatekeeper allow the change to
be integrated.
In this definition, the gatekeeper is more of a "clerk" than an "executive".
If this was a simple project, Sun would of kept it secret and plodded
along as it always has, now they have choosen to get Solairs Freeware
star power in Steve C.
This sounds more like a "I don't like SteveC" rant, which is unfortunate.
-John
----
[1] All generalities are wrong.
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