Keith M Wesolowski wrote: >> Or they could just ignore it entirely and put their projects on >> SourceForge... > > They could do that with endorsed projects, too. Hosting services are > artifacts, not the main reason to seek endorsement. In fact, although > 7.10 requires that certain archived mailing lists be made available to > Community Groups, there is in fact no requirement at all that projects > be given any hosting resources at all. Indeed, it would be fine for a > project team to decide to host its materials elsewhere if the > sponsoring Groups approved. That would make opensolaris.org > marginally less integrated, but since Groups would still provide links > to their projects, it would hardly be devastating.
OGB/2007/001 requires that you get the approval of both a community group (2.7) *and* the OGB (2.2) which seems like overkill. What happens if there isn't an appropriate group for a new proposal? Under OGB/2007/001 any such project would not be allowed to exist, and even if there is a relevant community to sponsor the project, does the project have to wait until the next OGB meeting to get approval to start? > The policy itself describes the motivation for requiring projects to > be endorsed by Groups, and the Constitution itself requires it. > Anyone can go off and do anything they like so long as they follow the > license terms, but creating a "project page" somewhere does not make > that work an OpenSolaris Project as defined by the OpenSolaris > Constitution. While we're not trying to discourage anyone from doing > so if they wish, it's likely that people wishing to integrate their > work will be more successful (and get more of the information they > need) by working with the Community Groups, which are intended to be > the reservoirs of technical expertise. The constitution talks about Communities 'initiating and managing projects to accomplish [their] activities', (7.1) I don't see anywhere where it says that creating projects is the exclusive preserve of Communities, or that creating Projects requires OGB approval. The whole point of OpenSolaris is to try to attract people with skills and ideas that the community *doesn't* have - remember "Innovation happens elsewhere"? Requiring that everything fits into a set of predefined boxes (Communities) will hamper that process. I expect there to be many Projects which grow into Communities, and in fact we've already seen that happen. I don't see how that is going to continue if OGB/2007/001 governs the way we operate. >> Personally I don't understand why setting up a new project has to >> involve so much BSDM. Sure we don't want people hosting their pr0n or >> MP3 collections on OSO, but why all the hoopla? Don't we want to >> encourage projects rather than discourage them? > > Again, it's not about hosting. And yes, we do want to encourage > projects - but we also want to encourage project teams to (a) be > informed about the areas in which they are working, and (b) avoid > wasting effort on something that can't possibly succeed. That assumes the OGB has expertise in all the possible areas in which people might want to contribute, and that patently isn't true. The OGB are not mandated to tell people what will or won't 'possibly succeed'. That would be borderline acceptable where the people being 'told' are employees of the people doing the 'telling', it is completely unacceptable in an open source context. Projects that aren't viable will die, but there is no good way of telling which category a project is in without letting natural selection take its course. We should welcome *anyone* who wants to contribute do so, as long as the project is clearly related to OpenSolaris - even if there isn't an appropriate Community for it to live under, and even if the OGB think it is a dumb idea. > Requiring > the endorsement of the appropriate Group is not a high hurdle for any > reasonable project with an organised team, and the need to write a > concise and meaningful 1-paragraph description of one's project goals > is a trivial requirement. Anyone who can't do that can't possibly > succeed anyway, so why should anyone invest even 10ns in reading about > the project or helping it get hosting? As I've said, in some cases there won't be an 'appropriate Group', what then? I agree with the need to write your aims down before starting, and I agree that there needs to be some minimal sanity check before giving people resources, but the process defined in OGB/2007/001 is just not appropriate. -- Alan Burlison --
