On Tue, Aug 07, 2007 at 05:26:58PM -0700, Stephen Lau wrote: > With a key difference being that ON went and built its own website and > infrastructure: opensolaris.org. ON wasn't joining anyone else's community. > > If LDoms wants to pursue that path, then more power to it. But it's > seeking to join our community, and as such, should play nice by how our > community feels.
This may come down to whether we envision OpenSolaris as inclusive or exclusive. If we're trying to be inclusive, we need to give this case some serious thought and construct some kind of simple, lightweight process that everyone is expected to follow. Since feedback on this was strongly in favour of inclusiveness, we need to provide a compelling argument if we intend to be exclusive. And that's what I read from your "my way or the highway" approach. As Mr. Plocher notes, it's important to have a lightweight process for handling exceptions. Right now, we don't have it - the constitutional means of disbanding a Community Group is not especially lightweight, and Members' grants remain for a long time afterward. The analogy that springs to mind is the European labour market. As a young person in Europe, it's relatively difficult to obtain a permanent job because it's so difficult for employers to RIF them later if deemed necessary. Economists cll this an inflexible market. Nature abhors a vacuum, so the market has created its own flexibility in the form of temporary jobs. While this is suboptimal, it does mean that more people work than otherwise could. We likewise have an inflexible exception-handling process that heavily penalises errors. We need to manufacture some flexibility here, even if, like a temporary job, the intermediate status is less than wholly satisfactory. The LDoms case is a perfect example for me: if, as an OGB member, I could vote against this CG's formation but direct its applicants to an alternate process that would result in a greater chance of CG formation in the future (perhaps as soon as a few months from now), I would do so. But we don't have that process, so I tend to agree with Mr. Plocher that denial is a bit unfair. If nothing else, this team at least seems to understand the difference between a Project and a Community Group, which is more than I can say for a good many Members. The only condition I'd like to impose is that they revisit their list of Core Contributors (it also seems to have been cast as "Leaders/Volunteers" - that needs fixing anyway), which seems excessively large. But that may, again, be a result of our failure to educate and explain - all the more reason we need an intermediate stage for CGs whose proposed Core Contributors lack a track record of contribution and day-to-day involvement in either open development or governance. Let's go ahead and add this CG application to the 15 August agenda. I've read enough. LDoms team, please amend your proposal to specify which individuals will be Core Contributors and which will be Contributors. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
