On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 10:52 AM, Matthew Nawrocki < matthew.nawro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So I listened in to most of the call and it seems that, more likely than > not, that the OGB is going to dissolve. My festering question is as > follows... if and when we turn the so-called steering wheel over to Oracle > for the community... what exactly will entail? Does this mean that we lose > control or what? > > The OpenSolaris Community was chartered to foster a development partnership between Sun and a community of operating system developers around the core components of Solaris. Along the way, other partnerships and communities came into being around other parts of the ecosystem (user groups, desktop, sourcejuicer, distros, etc), and were included under the OpenSolaris umbrella. Unfortunately, circumstances and desires changed within Sun/Oracle; their protracted and across the board silence about all things OpenSolaris has made it impossible to continue as an external development community associated with Solaris, as expressed in our Charter. There are two perspectives here, a practical one and a legalese one. As Alan said, from a practical POV, nothing changes: Oracle isn't playing with the community *now*. Without a partner for the OGB to dance with, the OGB can't actually do anything. While we have a bully pulpit, we can't actually force Oracle's employees to update our community website to support our constitution, to be active and vocal community members or to even provide schedule and content information concerning the distro that bears our name. Ben and others are very concerned that this action *might* provoke Oracle to shut down the community completely and cut off even the meager flow of code that trickles out today. >From a legalese POV, dissolving the OGB triggers a community reset back to Oracle: *1.3.5 Board Dissolution* If the Board membership falls below three, more than 14 months pass between Annual Elections or if the Electorate passes a motion of no confidence in the Board as a whole, then custody of the OpenSolaris community will temporarily revert to Sun Microsystems, which shall, at its sole discretion, appoint to the OGB additional natural persons sufficient in number to increase the OGB's membership to three. Those appointees shall serve only until a Special Election to elect a new Board can be held; their appointed term of office shall expire after 45 days, by which point a Board elected at a Special Election will have taken over. Dissolution will force Oracle to make some sort of public decision - to either reconstitute the community under the current Charter or to disband it and do something else. If it does something else, it will need a different charter - and a different set of leaders. If Oracle continues its silence and does nothing, then at least the 7 of us on the OGB get part of our lives back. Neither of these options are desirable, though. The OGB's hope is that Oracle will see this as a wake-up call to actively support an open development community tied to Solaris, and start interacting again BEFORE we dissolve. We (as private individuals) are passionately committed to an open Solaris development community, and see this as the only remaining tool we (as an OGB) have to break the logjam of indecision and silence that is killing our community. In the best of all worlds, our dance partner will show up, and we will end the evening in each others arms, having forgotten the missteps and awkward moments that troubled us when the music started.* -John ____ [*] Please don't take this analogy too far :-)
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