On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 01:55:02PM -0800, Roy T. Fielding wrote: > Article VII delegates all such work to Community Groups. Article VIII
Article VII delegates nothing. Nowhere does it assign powers to any Community Group or require that the OGB delegate any particular function to any or particular Community Groups. All Article VII does is define how a Community Group forms or terminates and who composes it. It does not require the existence or empowerment of any Community Groups, much less that any or all of them are to have technical control of existing consolidations. The OGB can act to make such assignments, but nothing obligates it to do so. Indeed, if one skipped article II, one would never even guess that the primary function of this community is the maintenance and extension of an existing operating system; none of the operative articles has anything whatever to do with that purpose or mentions how the _already extant_ content of that operating system is to be managed. It's almost as if the constitution were written with the intent that the OGB would somehow form a collection of Community Groups which would sally forth into the world creating project teams to go build an operating system from scratch, along the way fabricating from whole cloth a novel culture and set of social conventions. > In other words, you must be thinking of a different constitution. One can but hope. I'm referring to the one found at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/cab/governance/. > The OGB is first given all powers from the charter, and then forced to > delegate most of those powers, because that is how common governance Nothing in the Constitution requires the OGB to delegate anything. 7.1 merely permits their existence at the OGB's discretion. > >Let me distill it further: the OGB has the power to decide what code > >may be integrated. > > Nope. It has the power to stop integrations on opensolaris.org. If one assumes the desirability of a unified engineering community, these two are one and the same. Although I would phrase it slightly differently to remove the dependency on a particular web site: the OGB has the power to decide what code may be integrated into the community's repositories. This allows for the possibility that Sun will abandon its purported interest in open development, leaving the OGB no less empowered to make decisions for the entire community - one that no longer includes Sun employees - but stripped of Sun-supplied infrastructure. Don't get me wrong; this power must exist somewhere within the OpenSolaris community. But its assignment to the OGB without requiring subsequent delegation to (or even the existence of) appropriate technical bodies is a major weakness in this proposed constitution. Again, the code that requires open management _already_ _exists_ and is effectively controlled by Sun today, mainly because no functional structure exists in which any other organisation can exercise that control. The constitution as proposed offers absolutely no improvement on this state of affairs; it leaves all powers in the hands of the OGB. This is the same argument I've made since the current basic structure was proposed, and no one has yet succeeded in explaining why this concern is irrelevant or inappropriate, despite the GWG's decision not to act on it. > C-Teams are projects of a given community. What community that may Yes, they should be. Could you please tell me which section in the constitution requires this (or that technical control of the codebase must be assigned in any fashion to one or more Community Groups, or for that matter even acknowledges the necessity of exercising said control)? > Nor does it need to -- those are not governance issues, they are > decisions made by a community. The decisions will be made according > to the governance procedure in the constitution, but that is > significantly > different from enshrining one person (or one employer's) traditions > within the decision-making procedure itself. The personal and cultural > traditions and biases of the voting core contributors will determine > the results of each community decision, not some stale piece of > parchment. Then perhaps you and I may be in agreement as to the effects of the constitution (modulo your assertion that the OGB is required to delegate any of its powers), and we disagree only as to the desirability of these effects. The Constitution as proposed does nothing to allocate, share, or limit powers and responsibilities that the Charter does not already do. And under that Charter, Community Groups have thus far exercised no power, made no important decisions, and controlled (with any semblance of transparency) no aspect of the process of engineering anything. As a referendum on this state of affairs, the constitution fails completely. As a guide to the next OGB's actions it offers little. As an opportunity to confirm the OpenSolaris community's replacement of Sun as the sole technical authority over OpenSolaris's engineering practices and content, it is a lost one. Unfortunately, the ratification vote is a catch-22: for whatever reason, Sun (in the person of Stephen Harpster) has seen fit to extend the original CAB members' terms of office not once but twice in an effort to complete this work. If the constitution is not ratified, the existing members will be expected to revise it until the community approves or their term expires and Sun appoints someone else to continue doing the same. But what hope do we have that the same people will manage to fix in less than 4 months a problem the existence or importance of which they spent a year consciously denying? Sadly, it appears at this time that the best option is to ratify the constitution, deficiencies and all, and hope that the next OGB will make its clarification a top priority. Small wonder there's been a surge in interest in governance - many may finally feel hope that their concerns will be heard. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
