After reading the description of community and project, it would seem that the option that best meets the project guidelines is number 2. (The guidelines seem clearly state that communities should sponsor projects, and not projects sponsor/create new projects.) OGB may not have to arbitrate these kinds of issues, but making the right decision on how communities and projects are initially created can help minimize conflict.
Using option 3 would seem to create some problems. If we setup related projects for each of the platforms and have projects that are related, this seems to be requiring engineers to endorse, monitor and work in multiple spaces on related projects. In addition, this could require competitors to work in a competitor's project area. If the platform community sponsored a project, and a neutral/common project then gets created, multiple vendors would be able to contribute to a common project. Case in point... we want to start an AMD IOMMU project. I understand that there is already a project started in the Intel space. (I can't seem to find it... which is another problem.) If this project was already in the Intel project space, it would seem that we would have to work in the Intel project space, or deal with the issues of merging two project spaces. In addition to this being awkward/frustrating for competitors, it would seem to be a hassle for the Sun engineer working on any common code. Wouldn't it be preferred to have a project (IOMMU) defined in a more neutral space that might be sponsored by multiple communities, like device drivers, AMD, Intel and Sun/Sparc? (This seems to be the way that the PowerPC community and projects were done.) -George -----Original Message----- From: James Carlson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 6:43 AM To: Ostrovsky, Boris Cc: ogb-discuss at opensolaris.org; Herman, George Subject: Re: [ogb-discuss] Creating a place for AMD-related work Ostrovsky, Boris writes: > What is the process for creating such an umbrella project? Or, rather, > how can a project create a sub-project? According to > http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/policies/project- > instantiation.txt > a project can only be started by a community (or communities). I would just start the umbrella project in the community by posting a description of the overall project (as outlined in that document) to the community group mailing list, gathering the votes to endorse the project, and then contacting Eric Boutilier to set up the opensolaris.org structures needed for the project. There's no need to get fancy about this. If a project can self-organize into smaller units for its own purposes, then more power to it. The web site infrastructure already allows you to set up whatever pages and source code management resources you need, and Eric can set up multiple mailing lists (if you need that), so I think you're all set. > There is also a question of developing features that are common to > multiple platforms. If different platforms are interested in similar > functionality (but with separate architecture-specific low-level > drivers), how would creating common code be coordinated between > platform-based projects? With platform communities, there is a project > co-sponsored by them, with a single source tree. There are multiple ways to do this, but I don't think the OGB is the best arbiter of those resources. What you need to get is common agreement among the project teams that creating the common code (or framework) is the right thing to do. You can do that by talking with the other project teams, or by getting the community group to endorse the approach (and thus require it out of each of its endorsed projects), or by creating such a framework in your own project and then getting ARC approval for it. The OGB isn't involved in that process unless there's some unresolved (and unresolvable) conflict in the community group, or there are conflicts between community groups. I wouldn't suggest using that path, as the OGB's powers here are administrative rather than technical, and we essentially get to terminate the bits that aren't working. -- 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
