On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 08:32:58PM -0800, Stephen Lau wrote: > > - Website Review Committee - who are the members going to be? > > Only Rich Teer & I have accepted so far. > > > > > I think Rich is still in the process of appointing members; I'm open to > discussion if Rich wants to have it. If he is just waiting for > responses from contacted people, then no need.
Actually I would like to discuss this, because I'd like to disband both bodies. Asserting editorial control of web site content just creates a flashpoint for drama, and it appears that some of the best candidates for the editorial board have declined to serve. SMI appears to want this control and has the law on its side, so let them have it. Anything else just wastes time. > > - Website Community - leave in place? disband? wait for > > proposal to revise the charter? (We've heard from Alan B, > > but what about the other Core Contributors?) > > > +1 > > - OpenSolaris Trademark & Distro Branding > > > Until we have Bill Franklin's response, I'm not sure what discussion we > can have re: this. The OGB has no authority over SMI's trademarks so what there is to discuss? Who needs to waste weeks churning impotently? They're going to do what they want; if you don't like it, leave. The value in staying close to Sun is the value inherent in Solaris; if "Sun OpenSolaris" is not Solaris but Indiana, that's itself a fork and the value is gone anyway. So what's the harm then in one more fork? You could even follow the BSD model and occasionally pull in things that make sense to you from the Sun fork. Better than wasting time on a mailing list battle that can't be won. I'm sincerely enthusiastic about OpenSolaris = Indiana and hope SMI wraps that up sooner rather than later. But we don't have a role in it IMO. > > - Sun Open Source Innovation Awards Program - the Advocacy > > community is running fast with this - is there anything > > for the OGB to do? Do we want any say on the final > > proposal to Sun > I'd say no need. The Advocacy Community is running with it and as long > as there haven't been any issues with it (I don't know of any), I'd say > there isn't anything for the OGB to do here. There's nothing to do here but not because the Advocacy Group is doing a great job with it (they might be, but it doesn't matter). Bottom line is that SMI has asked an Advocacy-sponsored mailing list for input into a private business decision. Had it asked the OpenSolaris Community for that input, the OGB would have been involved. Since we weren't, we can safely assume that SMI does not desire the Community's input into this particular private business decision. That's fine; it's their money. Therefore the Advocacy Group is not acting on behalf of the Community nor is it even acting as a part of the Community; the individuals in question are, of their own volition on an ex officio basis, either providing consulting services to SMI or performing the functions of their employment. None of our business, in other words. Most of these items aren't worth discussing. I won't bother writing further about them, and I discourage others from doing so. Some things, though, that might be worth considering: 1. Which CGs should be terminated? Mr. Fielding's answer seems to be "most of them, because they're not following the rules". Another answer might be "all of them; CGs as defined by our constitution don't make sense for the kind of development process we want". Yet a third, which preserves both constitutional structure and the development process I think most of us want, would be "all of them that are not responsible for consolidations." Other reasonable and useful answers are possible as well. Unfortunately many of these answers contradict past experience in attempting to establish the "right" set of Groups, leading us to ... 2. Where does explicit description of the development process (or, at minimum, a description of the OpenSolaris Community's output and the manner in which it is blessed) belong? Past assertions that this is "not a governance issue" have resulted in chaos and a system in which a large number of disjoint CGs are supposedly intended to somehow created a unified, cohesive set of output suitable for compilation into various products. This makes no sense. 3. In line with (1) and (2) and Mr. Plocher's sensible assertion that changing the constitution is preferable to being bound by rules we think unhelpful, what constitutional amendments might the outgoing OGB want to recommend? It's not clear who has authority to place an amendment on the ballot, but a reasonable reading of the constitution is that any Member can do so just by mailing it. That should not prevent us from trying to package up a collection with some coherent purpose and endorsing them. It may not be worth considering any of this because "the OpenSolaris Community" may not exist much longer in any form to which these questions are relevant. Still, if the form it eventually takes is unsatisfactory to a significant number of participants, these discussions could provide valuable background to them in pursuing something like our original objectives elsewhere. And, yeah, for the millions of you who were waiting anxiously for my answer to Mr. Grisanzio's question, I'm sticking around for at least a little while longer because there still seem to be some opportunities to do something useful, though not any of the things I had originally hoped to accomplish. SMI's impending changes form something of a singularity and it will be interesting to see whether we can do things now that will have positive effects afterward. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
