[advocacy-discuss] Project Indiana and the OpenSolaris name

[Eric Boutilier]

[ Moving to advocacy-discuss ]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Alan Burlison wrote:
> Eric Boutilier wrote:
>
>> As Alan Coopersmith just alluded to, it's not up to the OGB to
>> mandate a vote. (Nor is it up to Sun of course); and among those
>> who do have the power -- Community Groups and their Contributors
>> -- there isn't a collective push to put it to a vote.
>
> That's a ludicrous position.  If the OGB doesn't mandate what will and
> will not be voted on, who will? 
>

You're right, a mandate to hold a vote has to come from the top
"appellate court" (the OGB in our case). My point, more
correctly stated, is that the OGB chose not to mandate a vote
due to lack of justification, which was due to the relative
weakness of the push coming from Community Groups and
Contributors to do so.

> ...
>> Thus, concedingly, +1 from me too, which I'm declaring simply
>> because I'd like to be "on record" as among those who dissented
>> -- albeit from what appears to be a very large majority view.
>
> The whole point of any voting mechanism is to gauge the opinion of the
> electorate.  Without that you get into the farcical position we see so
> often in the OpenSolaris 'community', where multiple small subsets of
> the 'community' all simultaneously claim to speak for the majority, with
> no evidence to support their claim.
>
> We have democratic mechanisms, we should damn well use them.
>

Agreed. We're certainly being watched very closely by the rest
of the FOSS/UNIX/Linux world -- and from day one we've been
breaking exciting new ground in that world in tons of wonderful
ways -- but utlimately, I'd argue, how we use our democratic
mechanisms will be their acid test of our open-ness. Make or
break, so to speak.

Eric