Keith M Wesolowski wrote:
Or they could just ignore it entirely and put their projects on
SourceForge...
They could do that with endorsed projects, too. Hosting services are
artifacts, not the main reason to seek endorsement. In fact, although
7.10 requires that certain archived mailing lists be made available to
Community Groups, there is in fact no requirement at all that projects
be given any hosting resources at all. Indeed, it would be fine for a
project team to decide to host its materials elsewhere if the
sponsoring Groups approved. That would make opensolaris.org
marginally less integrated, but since Groups would still provide links
to their projects, it would hardly be devastating.
OGB/2007/001 requires that you get the approval of both a community
group (2.7) *and* the OGB (2.2) which seems like overkill. What happens
if there isn't an appropriate group for a new proposal? Under
OGB/2007/001 any such project would not be allowed to exist, and even
if there is a relevant community to sponsor the project, does the
project have to wait until the next OGB meeting to get approval to start?
The policy itself describes the motivation for requiring projects to
be endorsed by Groups, and the Constitution itself requires it.
Anyone can go off and do anything they like so long as they follow the
license terms, but creating a "project page" somewhere does not make
that work an OpenSolaris Project as defined by the OpenSolaris
Constitution. While we're not trying to discourage anyone from doing
so if they wish, it's likely that people wishing to integrate their
work will be more successful (and get more of the information they
need) by working with the Community Groups, which are intended to be
the reservoirs of technical expertise.
The constitution talks about Communities 'initiating and managing
projects to accomplish [their] activities', (7.1) I don't see anywhere
where it says that creating projects is the exclusive preserve of
Communities, or that creating Projects requires OGB approval.
The whole point of OpenSolaris is to try to attract people with skills
and ideas that the community *doesn't* have - remember "Innovation
happens elsewhere"? Requiring that everything fits into a set of
predefined boxes (Communities) will hamper that process. I expect there
to be many Projects which grow into Communities, and in fact we've
already seen that happen. I don't see how that is going to continue if
OGB/2007/001 governs the way we operate.
Personally I don't understand why setting up a new project has to
involve so much BSDM. Sure we don't want people hosting their pr0n or
MP3 collections on OSO, but why all the hoopla? Don't we want to
encourage projects rather than discourage them?
Again, it's not about hosting. And yes, we do want to encourage
projects - but we also want to encourage project teams to (a) be
informed about the areas in which they are working, and (b) avoid
wasting effort on something that can't possibly succeed.
That assumes the OGB has expertise in all the possible areas in which
people might want to contribute, and that patently isn't true. The OGB
are not mandated to tell people what will or won't 'possibly succeed'.
That would be borderline acceptable where the people being 'told' are
employees of the people doing the 'telling', it is completely
unacceptable in an open source context. Projects that aren't viable
will die, but there is no good way of telling which category a project
is in without letting natural selection take its course. We should
welcome *anyone* who wants to contribute do so, as long as the project
is clearly related to OpenSolaris - even if there isn't an appropriate
Community for it to live under, and even if the OGB think it is a dumb
idea.
Requiring
the endorsement of the appropriate Group is not a high hurdle for any
reasonable project with an organised team, and the need to write a
concise and meaningful 1-paragraph description of one's project goals
is a trivial requirement. Anyone who can't do that can't possibly
succeed anyway, so why should anyone invest even 10ns in reading about
the project or helping it get hosting?
As I've said, in some cases there won't be an 'appropriate Group', what
then? I agree with the need to write your aims down before starting,
and I agree that there needs to be some minimal sanity check before
giving people resources, but the process defined in OGB/2007/001 is just
not appropriate.
--
Alan Burlison
--
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