[advocacy-discuss] Project Indiana and the OpenSolaris name

[Eric Boutilier]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> Shawn Walker wrote:
>> On 31/10/2007, Alan Burlison <Alan.Burlison at sun.com> wrote:
>>> Simon Phipps wrote:
>>>
>>>>>   Who is it?  I think it's an important question.
>>>> There is no arbiter - that would imply a political frame. This is an
>>>> open source community - we iterate until we need to fall back on plan B.
>>>> Hopefully that doesn't happen.
>>> That's ridiculous.  We then end up having meta-arguments about who
>>> decides/when it is appropriate for there to be a vote.  If there is no
>>> effective process for deciding when a vote is appropriate, then there is
>>> effectively no voting process at all.
>>>
>>> Article III
>>> Members are given the right to vote on Community-wide decisions
>>>
>>> How?
>>
>> I think that's one of the holes in the current constitution. As far as
>> I know, the only way for a vote to happen is for the OGB to call one
>> either because they decided to or because a proposal was brought to
>> them by the representative of a community group(s).
>
>
> I agree it's a hole. Perhaps it will be fixed in the next OGB election
> if the Constitution is addressed and/or updated.
>
> But it seems to me that the Core Contributors can assert here if they
> wanted to. They are the "Members" of the OpenSolaris Community, that
> much is clear. But they don't seem to communicate as a group (or at all,
> actually), so therefore they have no platform from which to argue for
> consensus. They are simply individual voices among everyone else. This
> also seems true of the OGB. When we hear from the OGB, many times the
> comments are qualified with "speaking for myself, not the OGB" and that
> also reduces the impact of the statement. If people are not happy with
> an issue and want to change it then they need to organize and assert --
> just asserting is not enough.
>
> Jim

Totally agree, and on the plus side, it appears we're on our way
to seeing it actually happen for the first time in the form of
the "Plocher trademark policy proposal" that's been taking shape
recently.

Eric