Roy T. Fielding writes: > In accordance with Article VIII of the OpenSolaris Constitution, > public votes are required for release plans and release decisions > within any project governed by an OpenSolaris Community Group. > A release is defined as any packaged distribution intended for > people outside the originating community.
There's an important line here that I think is getting muddied. Many projects release binaries intended for use outside of the project team or community without (in my opinion) running afoul of those rules. Those binaries represent "alpha test" or "demos" or "proof of concept" or other such not-quite-release-quality efforts. The Crossbow, Clearview, and xVM projects (to name a few obvious examples) have done this for some time without trouble. The difficulty here is that we've got multiple people involved with and on the periphery of this rather important project who have different views of what the project is actually doing, and multiple conflicting actions taken. I've talked privately with project team members who tell me that this is just a "preview" -- a demonstration -- and no more than that. It appears to me that someone who thinks it amounts to something _other_ than a mere preview modified the www.opensolaris.org web page with a new logo and text outlining the entire community's future and offering these bits as something more akin to a release. After looking through the materials, and this request for help, I find that I'm more sympathetic to the project team's intentions and believe that this request may prove to be a bit premature and the requested action both insufficient to solve the problem and excessively broad in its effects. If the www.opensolaris.org page can be repaired, and the appropriate actions result from the OGB's draft request to Sun, then I'd be in favor of either taking no action on this request or (at most) delivering a formal reminder that releases, unlike demos, require community votes. Let's try to get this right before reaching for stronger measures. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
