On Jan 31, 2007, at 10:01 PM, Jim Grisanzio wrote:
I don't think anyone is pinning participation exclusively on any license choice, per say. It's just one factor among many. People are already contributing to the project in many ways, and in fact, the community is starting to grow in ways not directly tied to opensolaris.org. Which is great. We need that diversity, especially for the non-coding types like me. The engineering will always be here (on opensolaris.org), but that's only one layer of the community (albeit a rather important layer :)). Some want to contribute more, though, and that's great. As we evolve some of the tools, that will be easier.
I nod to pretty much all of what you write there, but the last sentence is something I want to illuminate. Oh, yes we need tools, and most certainly things need to be easier and mature... but we're approaching year #2. I don't want to be cynical just to be cynical, but much of my bother comes from the thought that if 2 years isn't enough, then what is enough? Four years? Five? Looking beyond two months from now, the roadmap is literally blank, and surely that's not because "everything" is finished. That roadmap is the public's way to benchmark progress, and it says nothing.
I shot that image of the CAB in Sun's San Francisco office and the choice of background was mine exclusively. I simply liked it, that's all.
The logo statement by me was a rhetorical one... put there to illustrate my point that perhaps, just perhaps, that A reason for so- so growth and poo-poo'ing by other FOSS crowds is that the /image/ of OpenSolaris makes it seem like a front for Sun to look good. Now, I'm not agreeing with that assessment, but if I consider the overall marketing and psychological impression of how one contributes to OpenSolaris, I can see how people can feel that way no matter how untrue to that the real situation may be.
So my position is that OpenSolaris needs to be a free-standing ORG. Sun can still sponsor it, and most of the day-to-day technical dissertation and contributions would continue as they do today, but the ins and outs of evolution and maturity and - most importantly - process action and development, would happen on a 100% community basis, not with some parts here and other parts in SUNW. As you say, the upcoming OGB election is a promising step in this direction, as I hope it will result in a group that's less top-heavy with SUNW people... and nothing against SUNW people but such a result would have very good benefits for how the greater FOSS world perceives OpenSolaris.
Now, to you License Warz folks, switching to GPLv3 would be just window dressing. I'm talking about a holistic, ground-up evolution of OpenSolaris as an organization. Changing licenses to appease the Linux folks would be, at the least, disingenuous since at the end of the day, OpenSolaris would still be the same organization underneath. Bigger and more honest gains can be had by other means:
I've always disagreed with this analogy (the umbilical cord bit). When you say "Sun" what do you mean? Who are you interacting with? Execs or engineers? What about those 1,000 or so Sun Solaris engineers? Where do they go when thing so-called cord is cut?
I'm referring to SUNW - the corporate entity, not at all the people we all know and appreciate. The proverbial cord I referred to was the cord of ownership. As I said before, if I want to contribute, I have to agree to a contract with SUNW. If I get one of those nice OpenSolaris badges for my website and alter it (and I have done so), it'll probably be a lawyer who represents SUNW taking me to task about it. That, and things in that vein are what I am referring to as "the cord."
Combined with the above and my statements two to four paragraphs up, I'll reiterate - OpenSolaris needs to be truly, 100% and absolutely owned by The Community. This Community is pretty much what we already have - Sun employees and people like myself and anyone else for that matter working to suggest, improve, and expand our golden egg. Make OS.org is own entity, assign the relevant trademarks to it, and send it off to college. SUNW has been good training wheels, but it's time to start seriously thinking of taking those off at a prudent point and let OpenSolaris live on its own. I believe that event and a very public journey towards realizing it would make a world of difference in terms of Community expansion into the future.
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