Hey Mark,

On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 00:24 -0500, Mark Sweeney wrote:
> Actually, I am convinced about the advantages of open source
> development, it was one of the primary reasons I joined Sun; I thought
> the fact that my work would be released would be cool.  I'm looking
> forward to community submissions once we have something going, that's
> why I am trying to set up a community!!! :)  The CIFS dev team has
> done a lot of work and once we get the base functionality out and
> published as open source, any work submitted to build the advanced
> features would be greatly appreciated.  I'll gladly volunteer to
> mentor a team of interested developers if they want to add a certain
> feature.

Awesome, thanks heaps for this.

> I'm not sure what you mean by an 'open development process.'  If
> anyone in the OpenSolaris community wants to build something they can
> choose their team and how best to manage it, and we have several major
> open source contributors involved in this project, (I have mentioned
> Boris Popov at the top of this thread), it's just that we are doing
> the solaris kernel integration work in house.  I'd like to understand
> what you mean, however, so if you can post something or point me to a
> document online, that'd be much appreciated.

I think this has already been summarized well by Karyn, so I won't
really labour the point. I'm sure you're aware as everyone else that
there's 100's of really keen and interested people out there in the
projects that you're proposing and the community you're creating. I'd
just love to see us maximize that as much as possible. Creating the
excitement much like the BrandZ guys have done by releasing an early set
of code for people to build, install and test has the best chances of
encouraging people to contribute further down the line.

> In terms of requiring a senior developer, planning to complete a
> project requires completing certain tasks and being staffed to match
> up the personnel's skills with the task difficulty.  The design and
> code work we are doing is quite a complex kernel to kernel port and
> would require someone senior.

I've had some very humbling experiences within the GNOME community - to
the extent that I admit there are really gifted 12 year olds in the
community that can code circles around me, immediately grok the
technology and have some really interesting ideas of where to go. Of
course, you come across the opposite too :)

Experience helps, but sometimes it's not the be all and end all..

> I agree that community building/development is part of yearly
> performance goals and metrics.  It's part of yours too, and I'm part
> of the OpenSolaris community.  You probably don't realize this, but
> personal attacks on someone's character are not encouraged on these
> forums, that is defamatory, and contrary to the "Terms of Use" clause
> 3.  If you have an issue with someone's attitude or want to insinuate
> secondary motives I would recommend contacting the person via email to
> helpfully handle or escalating to forum moderators or sun management.

If I've come across as defamatory, I apologise. That wasn't the
intention of the mail. I'm just passionate about all this stuff, and
like many others, I want OpenSolaris to succeed and was concerned about
some of the perceptions that you had for community development. I think
having open discussion like this is useful though - it really highlights
the diverse community that we've created, the different viewpoints we
all have and yet, we're all pretty focused on much the same set of
goals.

I'm just hugely aware of the number of open source projects that Sun has
started that really haven't been traditionally 'Open Source', where
we've dumped the code over the wall, and expected the community to clean
up the mess. We have this ball and chain reputation to carry around. I'm
sure there's heaps of people out there monitoring the project to see if
it will go the same way. Every indication I've seen tells me it won't ;)

Best of luck with the CIFS community - I'm sure it'll be great.


Glynn

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