johansen-osdev at sun.com wrote:
>> That is, I contented that a Project may start life as Sun Confidential
>> (or Nexenta, or whatever), and ultimately plan on opening up later.
>> There can be various reasons, none of which are inherently evil, for the
>> project to start life as such.
>>
>
> I understand that a closed project may want to become open. I think
> that's great. Closed projects that want to become open shouldn't get
> special status. If the project wants to be open, let it do its reviews
> in the open. It doesn't seem acceptable to have this any other way.
>
> It doesn't make sense to me that a project can say, "We want to be open,
> but we don't want our reviews public." This is saying you're open
> without actually being open. In fact, I don't believe that OpenSolaris
> should be endorsing projects that aren't open.
>
> Maybe I've misunderstood something fundamental? Why should some
> projects get to have it both ways?
>
Because, otherwise, if you don't provide a forum for them to get ARC
input early, then they won't get it. If they then try to open up later
and ARC says, "no, you have to do it this way", the likely course of
least resistance is to abandon the process and keep the project internal
... and the source and the benefit will probably never see the light of day.
ARC input into the process early is _good_. If you can't do that, even
for projects which participants are not ready to advertise to the world,
then you will lose a large portion of participants who otherwise would
be contributors to the community.
Ultimately, if we can't make it work for Sun projects, then Sun will
eventually decide that the process costs too much or is unworkable, and
will abandon the project.
And note that I'm not saying that final review doesn't happen in the
open; I'm only suggesting that there should be a way for folks to get a
more restricted view by the ARC so that when they do open up, they have
a much better chance of having well-formed proposal.
-- Garrett
