On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 4:25 AM, Alan DuBoff <alan.duboff at sun.com> wrote: > Not to dis Roy, but he wasn't really a part of the Solaris community when > he was brought on the CAB (pre-OGB). At least not in the sense that he was > actively involved in any of the various groups, AFAIK. This was all part > of the grandios plan to have an open software figure (sic) on the > OpenSolaris CAB. > > To Roy's credit he stayed around for quite a while, and to that I tip my > hat, but to lash back with comments that Sun was using him for free labor, > well, I have no pity for that. They were certainly worth what Sun paid for > them, like all other opinions including mine. > > I always say, "True open source starts with grass roots and grows up > through the heart". It's hard to plant a seed to do that.
Roy, Brian Behlendorf, Greg Stein, myself, and many other 'open software figures' were specifically asked to join the OpenSolaris community to help it learn how to manage itself. We all spent *huge* amounts of time behind the scenes talking to Sun about OpenSolaris. No offense to the 'secret six', but almost none of them had been involved in large-scale open source projects or had a clue what that meant in practice. They were just users - that's wonderful, but neither them nor the Solaris Engineering team for the most part had any idea what it truly meant to run an OSS project. Statements like the above indicate to me that folks here still have little idea what it means to run an open-source project in a meritocratic fashion effectively. Therefore, instead of learning from the collected experiences of others, OpenSolaris is going to be doomed to go through the same problems every other OSS project and, potentially and perhaps irrevocably, harm the fledgling community in the process. What's so sad is that specific promises that were made that are *fundamental* to the independence of the OpenSolaris community were thrown out unilaterally by Sun and the OGB can't seemingly be convinced to do anything other than pout. I really really wish that OpenSolaris had succeeded - and if anyone for a second doubts that Roy didn't wish anything but success on this project, I'm saddened. The point of a governance system is to step in when things are broken, but it's clear (to me) that the OGB is willing to give Sun a pass on this - as they have done on most other things - and claim to fight for another day. But, avoiding this fight probably means that the OGB will never win a fight later on. The name of the project is the one thing that must remain in control of the community - and it's now been ceded back to Sun without a whimper. As Roy said, OpenSolaris can run just fine in the model of MySQL - but every so-called 'leader' in this community is doing a grave disservice by giving lip service to the community. Others will just continue to loot and plunder the Solaris source code and plop the code into real open source projects. OpenSolaris could have been so much more, but it's hard to see an effective self-governance come out of this...*sigh* -- justin
