[advocacy-discuss] Democracy and open source - nit - Re: [osol-discuss] Project Indiana and the OpenSolaris name

[Joerg Schilling]

John Plocher <John.Plocher at Sun.COM> wrote:

> Brian Gupta wrote:
> > In other words, Ian seems to have decided that democracy is a bad way
> > to run an open source project, and wants to install himself as
> > "benevolent dictator". 
>
> OpenSource efforts are invariably meritocracies.
>
> Those that /do/, lead.
>
> Ian and the OpenSolaris Project are out there /doing/.  They
> chartered a Project to do this, found several CGs to endorse
> their vision, and have just delivered the first distro built
> by the community out of the community's source code.

I believe the problem is that Ian did behave as if he did create a new
community. He did this with Debian but he cannot do it for the opensolaris
community that exists long before he came to Sun.

The OpenSolaris community is an offshoot from the SunOS community which
is heavily woven with the FROSS movement. Today people tend to forget that
most of the OSS programs have been initially developed on SunOS.

The OpenSolaris community is a live community that did not need help for
being created. This community did exists and created the first OpenSolaris
distribution (SchilliX) although at that time, Sun made clear that Sun is not
interested in supporting such efforts. Sun has been asked several times and 
Sun did not change.....

Now since Ian is at Sun, this seems to have changed but the constraints did not 
change. People did remember that Sun does not like to support the effort
made in projects that result in freely redistributable distributions based on
OpenSolaris. Now this may have changed but why didn't Sun first approach the
existing OpenSolaris based distributions for help? Why does Sun still not 
support them?

This creates the impression that Sun likes to dominate this "market". Instead of
conceding that this is something that has been initiated outside Sun and that 
Sun did better help the people who started this new area, Sun did start another 
project without asking the community. 

This is why we have long discussions.....


Jörg

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