Doug Scott wrote:
> If they are hacking away and have no community involvement, then why 
> should they be a Core Contributor? Are you wanting to encourage the 
> old Sun practice of throwing contributions over the wall when and if 
> they feel like it. Encouraging the Sun developers out of the closet 
> and into community involvement is long overdue.
Ignoring my juvenile desire to make jokes about coming out of the closet 
for a second...
I don't think people being a contributor or core contributor necessarily 
reflect open source practices.  Arguably, many of Sun's Desktop QA team 
devote countless hours to improving upstream open source code bases 
(GNOME or Mozilla being the obvious examples), filing bugs in their 
bugzillas, etc.  They may be quiet on the lists, but they're there - and 
they certainly aren't throwing stuff over the wall and skulking away.
So I agree with Ghee that they should be recognised for their work - and 
if they want recognition *as well* as the additional responsibilities of 
helping to lead and set direction for the Desktop Community - then "Core 
Contributor" is fine by me.  But if they don't want to play the active 
role in leading the Desktop Community, then "Contributor" should be the 
more appropriate role.

... or in Sun's long-held engineering practice: "shrink to fit"

I should be clear... there is *nothing* wrong with not wanting to play 
an active role.  I think people are (understandably) seeing 
"Contributor" as being a diminished role to "Core Contributor", but that 
shouldn't be the case.  I certainly don't have time to help set 
direction and lead the Desktop Community (ignoring the fact that I've 
not contributed *that* much (yet) and wouldn't qualify for the "Core 
Contributor" role anyway).  It's far easier to take the warm fuzzies of 
being a "Contributor" and not have the responsibilities of having to 
stay on top of everything going on.
> Not being able to vote does not stop your ability to do your own 
> coding or distributing your code. If you do not want to be part of the 
> community, then you should not expect to vote in it.
Hrm, that's not quite what I'm saying.  Being part of the community is 
different from leading the community.
We're all part of the community by merit of subscribing to this list or 
being interested in Desktop-y type things.
Contributors are explicitly recognised as valuable contributors to the 
community.
Core Contributors are supposed to lead the community and set charter & 
direction by virtue of their voting privileges.
>> It is with this same line of rationales, I encourage openly or 
>> privately all of the
>> Desktop communities to go for Core Contributor status so that we have 
>> the
>> opportunities to exercise the rights given the responsibilities of 
>> contributing to
>> the works. In particularly, we want to have sufficient representative 
>> say in the
>> voting of the greater OpenSolaris  issues, such as OGB member etc.
>>
>>   Currently, we have 10 Core Contributors from the Desktop communities
>> in the total of 325 Core Contributors, are we been proportional 
>> represented?
>> [Bearing in mind, the total number of Core Contributors will increase 
>> not
>> sure by how much]
>>   
> Ok, I will vote for my parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, wife, 
> daughter etc to become core contributors so desktop can dominate the 
> voting for the OGB :)
I nominate my dogs ;-)
One of them attacked a garden gnome the other day if that counts for 
anything...

cheers,
steve

-- 
stephen lau | stevel at opensolaris.org | www.whacked.net


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