Roy T. Fielding wrote:
On Sep 7, 2005, at 4:12 AM, Simon Phipps wrote:
I find strident and over-assertive language distressing whichever
party is using it.
I agree. In fact, the more strident and over-assertive (aggressive)
someone is the less credible they are. Just my opinion.
Irrelevant discussion on an open source project mailing list is
a cancer. It must be cut out to prevent those of us with high
email loads from unsubscribing. Pretty soon, the only people
left on the mailing list will be the ones not working on the
project.
Some engineers and managers have, indeed, unsubscribed -- primarily due
to flames, unfocused discussion, and volume. However, they continue to
participate on the more focused lists, and this trend will only continue
as hundreds and hundreds of Solaris engineers start participating when
their projects and consolidations join OpenSolaris. So, I agree we need
to be as focused as possible to keep the technical conversations from
getting lost.
However, just looking at the size of this community within Sun -- let
alone the size of the community externally and how we want to grow that
-- I seriously doubt that discuss can sustain any substantive technical
conversation at all. As a general purpose list, though, I think it's fine.
At this point, the number of people subscribing and unsubscribing to
discuss is pretty much the same over the last 4 weeks. Also, as people
unsubscribe from discuss, the traffic hitting the jive forums is
increasing massively each week -- 105,864 views just last week. So, word
about the project is spreading.
In general, as traffic increases on discuss -- no matter what the issue
happens to be -- people comment to me that they can't keep up, they want
to unsubscribe, and that the list is not focused. So, I'm not sure what
to make of it. One person's conversation is another's noise, I suppose.
BTW, that is also why Apache project lists are called
"dev", not "discuss", since it narrows the acceptable discussion
to something that active engineers can keep up with and still
do their work. The "general" and "users" lists, in contrast,
tend to be more verbose and less restrictive.
Around mid-pilot we started creating more lists to try to distribute the
load so the technical conversations would not get lost. The most
substantive technical conversations are happening on code, DTrace, etc.
However, we do need a venue for newcomers and general issues that are
project-wide. Although this is certainly developer program, we do want
to grow and get more diverse over time. We've been successful in
migrating most of the marketing conversations to the marketing list, and
that list has grown substantially and is self sustaining. People still
cross-post, though, which is a waste. Also, we will be adding an
"announce" list so that will take away the trivial announcements on
discuss.
I'm fine with leaving "discuss" as "discuss" because it has grown into a
general conversation list. We can certainly change the name if that's
the issue to make it more clear, though. I'm also happy to be more
assertive in pushing conversations to different lists, but when I do
that people either ignore the request or the thread dies and I get
slapped for butting in. Help me out on this one ... I'm not sure what
the best result is.
While OpenSolaris will not be switching to GPL any time for reasons I
have articulated on my blog, the CDDL may well be updated and improved
at an indeterminate future point and understanding issues with it is
valuable.
I think we should create a license-discuss mailing list if you
anticipate such changes, since the people who need to discuss
them (lawyers) are not here and never will be given the traffic.
....Roy
We have over 50 lists now (with 10 taking most of the traffic and many
not really online yet such as various user groups, etc), so one more is
not going to kill us. Happy to at least consider it.
Jim
--
Jim Grisanzio, Community Manager, OpenSolaris
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/
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