On Dec 10, 2007 10:20 PM, Keith M Wesolowski <keith.wesolowski at sun.com> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 10, 2007 at 09:46:31PM -0600, Shawn Walker wrote: > > > How much control do we really have as a community? > > If you read documents, you might come up with ambiguous answers or > different ones depending on the exact question you're asking. You > could instead look at the way things actually work and decide for > yourself. I've reached my own conclusions, but I'm not going to share > them publicly (and they'd be worth no more than yours anyway). > > A hypothetical to start with: suppose the OGB were presented with a > motion to declare some SourceForge site to be the OpenSolaris > Community's web infrastructure and abandon opensolaris.org to SMI. > What would happen? Would anything change, and if so, what and how?
I've always been of the belief that sourceforge is where projects go to die; their servers have all the reliability (and uptime) of a wet paper bag. Obviously it could be some other service, but I think Sun has provided a significant amount of resources and value with the resources they have so graciously provided to us despite the very little respect they have been given in return. I suspect such a decision would be disastrous at best. Our fortunes are directly tied to Sun's and such a schism would only serve to undo all of the good Sun has tried to do thus far. Sun could have just thrown up a sourceforge.net website and said "here's the code, have fun!" However, I believe they are and have genuinely tried to engage the community in every aspect of the development and culture of Solaris through the OpenSolaris.org community. I suspect Sun has gone through significant internal pain and difficulty (justifying OpenSolaris expenditures to the board, shareholders, etc.) to support our community. I hear people accuse Sun of just wanting "free labour" too often; they seem to ignore just how much this little "pr stunt" (as the critics claim) costs Sun and just how beneficial it could be for the community to have a synergistic relationship with Sun instead of "biting the hand that feeds them." -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." - Robert Orben
