[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Jim Grisanzio]

Laurent Blume wrote:
> Jim - I find Ted's article rather relevant.
>   

hi Laurent ...

Well, he makes some good points, yes. But you have to dig out from under 
the sarcasm to get to them. If the points were just neutral or 
constructive criticism or offers to help, than I'd not have a problem 
with it. I'd welcome it, actually. We've certainly had a lot of 
criticism on our own lists, so what's the big deal from outside. But as 
soon as someone attacks (especially if they are not involved), I stop 
listening. It's that simple. They lose their credibility. He quotes John 
Plocher at length, which is fine, but had he followed the rest of that 
thread he quoted he'd find that not everyone agrees with John. I 
certainly don't. And that's fine. That was just a discussion. And, 
actually, we've had that type of "who are we and where are we going" 
discussion many times before, and we have room here for many opinions. I 
feel lucky to be able to express my opinion with all these smart people 
in here. But from one quote he draws a conclusion that is wrong and it 
spins around to a variety of other issues. That's my only beef, really. 
An accusatory attitude can lead to incorrect or incomplete conclusions. 
And when we try to correct at least the factual errors while we 
acknowledge our shortcomings, many times we are just flamed more. Ted's 
article is not as bad as some others, though. But it fits the pattern.

I sent the links to this list because we all know our situation, and I 
wanted to engage the people who are /involved/ in a conversation about 
how we do more advocacy about the things we are doing right.


> Now, as a long-standing member of the Solaris, then OpenSolaris
> community, I'm completely in the dark as to where this community is going.
>   

Totally agree our communications have been poor this past year. And I 
think that is a problem across the project (Sun corporate, engineering, 
marketing, community), and some of us have been saying that for quite 
some time now. I think now we finally recognize the issue needs fixing, 
and I think we are going to make a good faith effort to start cleaning 
that up at the summit.

> First, what does OpenSolaris means? It's not what it was just one year
> ago. 

Right. It has changed. We started as a community and a bunch of source 
code, some distros and people came along, and now we are adding a new 
distro from which other distros can be built. That's a big deal. Some of 
us a long time ago wanted to launch with source /and/ a binary /and/ 
co-development tools, but heck, we were lucky enough to get out the door 
three year ago with buildable source (and swiss cheese source at that) 
with no binary (not SXDE, you know what I mean) and no development 
infrastructure. Sorry. What's happening now was no possible then, and 
it's not even close. Hundreds of things had to come first. We wanted 
more, and if you go back in the archives that's clear. I don't think we 
had a good sense of what "more" meant, obviously, because we had other 
things to do at the time. Anyway, then we had to spend over a year and a 
half after all that releasing the rest of the source and working on the 
site and other infrastructure issues.

In other words, we have done the best we could with the tools we've had 
given our circumstances at any given moment. I know people don't like to 
hear that, but what can I say. It frustrates me to say it, believe me. 
But to be honest, I have not met one person outside Sun who has a core 
competency in opening 10 million lines of kernel code (and millions more 
from other consolidations subsequently), much of which contained many 
diverse copyrights, on top of moving 1,000 engineers and all their 
infrastructure outside that makes up a product that touches virtually 
every part of the company and is tied to virtually all of the company's 
customers and revenue streams while the very same people build, ship, 
and support the product itself during a time when the company was 
struggling in the market. Think back 3 or 4 years ago. Things were very 
different for Sun back then. Excuses, I realize, but I'm still looking 
for the team that has done this before at this scale. We are not talking 
about a side product here. We are talking about the company's /core/ 
product. This effort had to take years, and for that reason, I have 
always advocated a massively humble approach in terms of public 
communications. Sure, we've screwed up some things -- name one project 
has hasn't -- but we've done a lot right when you look at it in context. 
That's all I want. To be judged in context.

> Will it be still the same in one year from now? 
>   

I hope it continues to change and grow and build on what we have done in 
the past. You have to expect a project this young and big to change. In 
fact, if we are going to reach out to quite literally hundreds of 
thousands of users, the community /will/ change big time. That's good. 
Now, I get your point here that our recent changes weren't handled well. 
I agree. We live and learn and move on and apologize along the way.

> Sun managed to kill all the buzz about the other OpenSolaris distros.
> Now, everybody outside some developers is waiting for that Indiana thing.
> For me, one year ago, «OpenSolaris» was a community, however new. Now,
> it's a Sun-controlled product in which we outside Sun have very little
> to say.
>   
Well, we can agree or disagree on those points and depending on my mood 
I go back and forth. :) However, if we want to make a /community/ of it 
we can because that is personal and that comes from direct interactions. 
In other words, stop thinking of "Sun" and go back to thinking of the 
individual "people" that you've had interactions with that created that 
feeling of community in the first place. That's what I'm trying to do, 
to be perfectly honest. I'm looking for people at Sun and outside Sun 
who are interested in collaborating on whatever project happens to be in 
front of my face. That's all I know how to do, Laurent. One at a time. I 
appreciate your position. I really do. There are many people who were 
turned off by recent events, but I'm happy we are having this 
conversation because that means we can re-connect.


> And, after Indiana/OpenSolaris ships next month - then what?
>   

We start building a user community. We engage application and package 
developers. We start taking a new class of contributions. We try to 
create systems to better manager the contributions we are already 
getting. We keep adding layers of the community on top, or around, what 
we have already built. We keep upgrading the website. We get our content 
management system and wiki. We localize the site. We meet more people. 
We move more infrastructure outside and finish the scm migration. We 
solve the bug problem. Etc. Etc. Etc. We just keep going. All of these 
things -- and many more -- are absolutely perfect community building 
opportunities. All of them. I don't view any of them negatively.

> My production systems are running Solaris. How will they benefit from
> OpenSolaris? What's the roadmap? Will there be patches to S10? Or some
> Solaris Next? Solaris 10 is getting old, and I feel the pressure to
> upgrade it. To what?
> I often read comments from Sun engineers advising to go to SXCR or
> Indiana/OpenSolaris. If I've got to put *my* job on the frontline, I'll
> got for something more reasonable, like RHEL, thank you.
>   

Sorry, my friend. You are a little out of my league on the various 
products and versions and such. :) Smarter people than I would have to 
offer come context here.


> So, where are we going? Who, in our Community, knows that?
>   

I think the OGB and Sun are concerned about the situation of 
communicating a strategy, and I feel we are going to seriously address 
it at the summit. Simon talked about generating some new documents 
articulating an overall strategy that Sun and the community can come 
together around, and we've had some preliminary conversations about it 
on the OGB (nothing in detail, though). We are going to have a 
governance panel at the Summit, and I expect this to be a topic of 
conversation. We needed a breather, though. We had to take this down 
time and pull back a bit. The Summit, Indiana, and CommunityOne have all 
been taxing things to implement at the same time, but things will come 
to fruition. And, I don't know, perhaps we'll come out of this stronger 
and better able to grow.

You have brought up a lot of good points. I don't have all the answers 
(or necessarily good answers), but I hope you feel I'm being straight 
with you. I'm just trying to move this forward to the next step and take 
one step at a time ...

:)

Jim

-- 
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/