Keith M Wesolowski wrote: > On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 02:41:13PM -0500, Eric Boutilier wrote: > >> This makes sense, but for some reason it feels like an >> exception in the making. On the other hand, it doesn't have >> to be, because certain other entities share the >> characteristics Bryan describes (mature, etc.). So in theory >> they could also request a desire to remain a community. So I > > Given the feedback we've received, it seems more that DTrace would be > the rule - that large projects, once integrated, are likely to grow > their own Community Groups. This leads to a much finer-grained notion > of what a Community Group is than the original proposal intended. > > The problem with this does not manifest itself in any of the Groups > under discussion (it matters little, to the OGB, whether a set of 16 > projects is sponsored by a Group called DTrace or one called > Observability or even one called OpenSolaris - but it matters very > much that the people making those decisions can do so with a minimum > of conflict and unity of purpose) but in the issue of consolidations. > We have not yet tackled this issue, but we must soon. In fact, > consolidations don't really fit at all into a fine-grained-Group > schema. They, not DTrace, are the exceptions in the making. > > It may be that we will need to represent each release train of each > consolidation as a project sponsored by the OGB itself, rather than as > a Group. This would have the benefit of further distinguishing a > collection of people (a Community Group) from a container for > artifacts of activity (a Project). It's still imperfect, but given > the Constitutional framework we have to work with, it's not > egregiously so. > > Follow-ups should probably trim the cc: list. >
Bryan's first-order test is intriguing. I think the impetus for this reorganisation is that it's not clear to people what the distinction is between a community vs. a project. If DTrace is a community, why shouldn't BrandZ, Xen, or Zones be a community? Why is mdb a community unto itself, when it seems to logically be contained within Observability? If mdb is a community, why not CPC or truss, or the ptools? My test is this: if someone were to go to opensolaris-discuss and propose DTrace or mdb now - would it be classified as a project, or as a community? If someone proposed another debugger, let's say "ndb", or someone proposed to port (god forbid) SystemTap to Solaris (ignore GPL issues, this is hypothetical) - would we grant them a community? No, we would say it's a project. So this seems to suggest that we need a path for "promoting" projects to be communities once they have reached some threshold. So maybe we give up the idea of uniformity in classification of communities/projects - and say *everything* starts as a project until it reaches said threshold at which point it becomes a community with governance? It lends itself to more organic growth, which seems to be the feedback I've been receiving here. cheers, steve -- stephen lau // stevel at sun.com | 650.786.0845 | http://whacked.net opensolaris // solaris kernel development
