On Nov 1, 2007, at 7:16 PM, Keith M Wesolowski wrote: > On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 09:03:48AM +0700, dougs at truemail.co.th wrote: > >> This a joke right? Or are you trying to divide the community? > > I doubt this is a joke. Roy's basis for this appeal seems reasonable, > and his desire that the OGB be more forceful in defending the > constitution does as well. It's entirely possible that the current > turmoil is awakening a lot of skeptics in this community to the value > of formal governance. Many may be willing to go read the constitution > and do the small tasks it requires of us in exchange for what amounts > to regulatory certainty. And if that gives the OGB greater political > capital to enforce its provisions, so much the better.
Exactly. I did not ask that the community members be taken out and shot -- I asked that the governance structure be replaced by something that can be responsible for governing itself. That is something the OGB can do (and should, IMO). It is a community's responsibility to govern its own projects. No matter how nice a group of people are working under the UMBRELLA of Desktop, the fact of the matter is that they don't work as one single community, they don't make decisions as one single community, and therefore they should not be one single Community Group as defined by the constitution. They should be several Groups. It is the OGB's responsibility to ensure that Community Groups are appropriately scoped such that they can (and do) govern their own projects, one their own public mailing lists, in an open and collaborative manner. Apache learned this a while back and since then regularly reevaluates its Projects (what we call Community Groups) and recommends that sub-communities be promoted to top-level status as soon as it becomes clear that the larger umbrella is not aware of everything going on underneath. Properly governing communities are self-regulating -- they don't cause issues to be bounced up to the board for resolution. Indiana clearly does not belong under Desktop -- it should be in a community dedicated to distributions, with full engagement of the other people here who also work on distributions, and making use of the voting mechanisms to resolve disputes and the ARC mechanism to help evaluate architecture. BTW, the OGB does need to resolve the issue of projects being "governed" by community "sponsoring". That is clearly absurd. Each activity within Solaris must be owned by a community -- the fact that other communities may think it is a good idea is irrelevant to governance. To those folks who think this is just bureaucracy in action, you are both right and wrong. OpenSolaris exists to provide a mechanism by which Sun can *share* governance of these projects with the wider community, specifically to enable the well-known benefits of open development within some open source projects. That open development governance is specifically what Jonathan asked the CAB to create when we met with him years ago. Without this minimum level of bureaucracy, nobody is left to govern but Sun, and there is absolutely no reason for this organization to exist if all decisions are going to be made by Sun. Indiana certainly doesn't need the OGB, community groups, or even the mailing lists to produce a distribution. It needs those things to produce a community of non-Sun people to be engaged in the open development of that distribution. > Whether this is divisive remains to be seen. 8.6 permits the OGB to > take any of 4 actions in this case: > > 1. Do nothing. > > 2. Terminate the Group. > > 3. Partition the Group. > > 4. Provide guidance to the Group. > > Which course of action we choose and the manner in which we pursue it > will factor heavily in the way the outcome is received. Right -- it gives the OGB a framework by which to construct a more long-term solution than simply resolving today's trademark issue. Ultimately, each community needs to govern itself so that the OGB doesn't have to fight fires in the midst of a wind storm. ....Roy
