On Jan 23, 2008, at 11:19 PM, Ben Rockwood wrote: > I think we all are seeing some serious flaws in the existing > organization based on a variety of examples in the last year. I have > plans to introduce a proposal in the next few weeks, as I've not fully > baked my proposed structure and associated constitutional amendments, > but I'll start throwing out some ideas. > > 1) The current Constitution has within it a major flaw, in that it > does > not define Projects. It refers to them, but never defines them.
That's because they are, according to the OS developers, time-limited subsets working on a specific problem within a specific community. Naturally, that ceased to be true as soon as people realized the OGB wasn't enforcing community scopes (or even validating the existing community scopes). > 2) Existing terminology is excessively confusing and has, to an > arguable > extent, painted us into corners. A "Community Group" sounds like a > loose collation of related "things". A "Project" sounds like a > place to > do work, collaborate on details, and work in a targeted way. The > Constitution puts organization in CG's, but not in projects... > projects > answer to and are "owned" by CG's. Because that is what the community wanted. I hate that terminology, but it exists because Sun Engineering has an existing terminology set which is different from the outside world. I would have preferred to eliminate all of the community discuss lists (meaningless distractions) and centered everything around projects (just like Apache). > This is where things get sticky. Lets take two examples, one that > works > in this model and one that doesn't. > > First, lets take the Advocacy CG. This is the model CG thanks to the > hard work of Jim G. You go to the CG main page and you are greeted > with > all the information you need to get started. There are several > projects, all well segmented, its a thing of beauty. This works, I > believe, because the core contributors of the Advocacy CG have a > handle > and grasp on all of the projects benieth it, even if they aren't > involved directly, and people contributing projects trust and look to > the leadership of the CG Core Contributors. Sara D. or Jim G. or > Teresa > G. (on and on) can speak to any of the Projects under the CG with > respect and trust, and then be back on their way. It is also the only community that has actually been approved by the OGB, AFAIK, and thus the only one done according to the constitution. > On the other side, lets consider the LDOM's CG proposal. This was > met > with the suggestion of instead collapsing xVM/Xen and Zones CG's > into a > larger Virtualization CG as projects, and then bringing LDOM's along > side. This didn't work (short version) because while LDOM's, Zones, > and xVM are all Virtualization efforts, they really are completely > distinct. Could Core Contribs of a Virtualization CG make judgements > that would be respected, trusted, and useful to the underlying > Projects? Not to mention that these are large efforts which > themselves > may require projects. For these reasons and more, it proved that > in our > Constitutional model "Virtualization" isn't a Community Group; > LDOM's is. That's fine. > 3) Now, lets consider the Distribution CG proposal (that will go to > vote > regardless of any discussion, btw). Shawn Walker is absolutely > correct > that there needs to be some way to bring distributions together in an > organized way within the OpenSolaris community framework. Linux > distros > are a great example, they are all over the place and independant, > wouldn't it be nice if all the OpenSolaris distros had a home (if they > choose to participate of course)? > > The problems noted above with the LDOM's effort are almost > identical in > the case of distributions. Should Core Contribs of a Distribution CG > make decisions about Belenix, Nexenta, Schilix and Indiana? I don't > think so. Never-the-less, there should be a grouping which I call a > "meta-community" or "Consortium" which can provide a loose social > grouping of CG's to facilitate collaboration and coordination. They should be given the choice to do so. This is essentially what ARC is imposing right now -- an architecture for OpenSolaris. Doesn't it make more sense to at least know what all distros are willing to agree to implement? > 4) There are two solutions (I'm still working through this, so this > isn't final) that I see... > > a) Push things down a layer. This would make the intuitive > definitions > make sense. This requires major modifications to the Constitution, > but > more closely mimics what we actually do in practice today. > b) Add an additional layer above CG's, my "meta-communities" or > "Consortiums" idea. Consortiums in this model wouldn't have any real > power at all, but would provide a much needed means to pull together > various functional areas of the project in a much more organized way. > > 5) If we are going to ever do away with the term "Community Group", we > should do it sooner rather than later. Its still very early in > OpenSolaris's life, I think doing so is no out of the question if > deemed > appropriate. By all means, spend the next three years on more meta-discussions instead of actually using what has already been agreed to. I think you should try using the powers that have been given to the OGB. > Like I said, I'm still baking the idea, but we need to make > contribution > much easier than it is today and currently there is too much > bureaucracy, partially because "projects" are somewhat heavy wieght... > if "projects" are much more granular it could facilitate handing out > projects more easily, better facilitating contribution, because > projects > come with repositories. How does changing the names in the constitution change that? If you want to explore this idea, then the easy thing to do is rearrange all of the existing communities into per-project communities. The names are irrelevant. > This all feeds into the contribution model which needs so much > work, but > I honestly have mountains of research to do before I can properly > express a useful stance. More importantly, I don't see Sun giving up control over the gates. Do you? Don't you think that might be governed by the constitution? It is. Do you know why they aren't governed by public CGs? Who do you think is responsible for enforcing that constitution? ....Roy
