> 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.
I agree. In fact, part of the reason that I _don't_ want DTrace to
be in the Observability community is that in the presence of say, a
SystemTap port to Solaris (shudder), it makes absolutely no sense for
SystemTap and DTrace to be in the same Community -- because they're
very much _not_ in the same community. (A more current example would
be ZFS and QFS, the communities of which are largely orthogonal.)
> 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.
Organic is good -- you don't want to be too rigid about the definition
of Community and Project. That said, there _is_ a distinction in the
Constitution and it's unfortunate that we have overloaded the term
"community" with a governance definition. It means that you either have
to (1) give every self-organizing community the right to determine the
fate of OpenSolaris or (2) tell some self-organizing community that,
while they might be a community, they are not, in fact, a Community.
Both paths are problematic, though if one must choose only between these
stark choices are would rather empower too many (overly inclusive) than
empower too few (overly exclusive).
But I think the notion of starting everything out as a project and
promoting accordingly is a good one. And I would also recommend a third
moniker for user groups, which I think is a large part of the governance
problem (like, say, User Group), but I imagine that that will require
constitutional modifications...
- Bryan
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Bryan Cantrill, Solaris Kernel Development. http://blogs.sun.com/bmc
