[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Dale Ghent]

On Apr 25, 2008, at 10:11 PM, Jim Grisanzio wrote:

>
> I agree on the communication bit. That will have to be addressed at  
> the
> summit. It involves advocacy.

Yes, advocacy is always a part of reaching out, and I don't think the  
advocacy effort is particularly anemic, either.

However, the problems we have - and is the source of missives on /.  
such as the one from Tso - occur after that point. Once a person takes  
notice of OpenSolaris (ie; is successfully advocated to) they come  
with the expectation of eventually contributing and find out that the  
mechanism of contribution is bewilderingly obfuscated and stovepiped  
inside a tower of SUNW lingo and internal processes.

Sign the Contributor Agreement
Gain Contributor status so you can get a cr.o.o account
Find a SUNW sponsor
Hope that your fix wasn't already accomplished by someone with a  
purple badge
And finally, hope to god that your improvement/fix doesn't require an  
ARC case.

For the uninitiated who has a 2-line fix for something oss-bite-size,  
the time and effort spent going through the rigamarole of getting that  
fix in the repository can easily be daunting. Granted, two of those  
four steps need only be done once... but even so it's a  
psychologically expensive barrier to entry. OpenSolaris then goes from  
something of interest to "eh" status and they move on or go back to  
their daily life as it was. It's just not as easy as posting one's  
patch to lkml or filing a bug with patch at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs

/dale