[ogb-discuss] OGB/2007/002 Community and Project Reorganisation

[Eric Boutilier]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, Keith M Wesolowski wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:55:30PM -0500, Eric Boutilier wrote:
>
>>> Perhaps "GNU User-land"?
>>
>> Or "F/OSS User-land", or "F/OSS Ports".
>
> Except that the userland that's part of OpenSolaris today qualifies
> for this description as well.  This has the same drawback as
> 'Freeware' in that the word adds no specificity to the description.
>
> Given that this entire community is built around Free Software, it
> seems redundant to qualify any project or community group's name with
> this or any similar term.

OK, I agree.

The word ports seems really well established in this context, e.g, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_collection 
So why not just "The Ports Community", and for the PowerPC/S390/etc.
community use one of the suggestions that doesn't use the word ports in it.

Eric


> If we want to have an organisational unit
> based around interest in proprietary software, that unit's name should
> be qualified.
>
> Essentially, I'm asserting that the F/L/OS aspect (which has no
> expression in common use that is neither offensive to some subset of
> the community nor excessively clumsy and obnoxious) is implied in
> everything we do unless explicitly stated otherwise.  The
> Constitution's Article II supports this:
>
>    # The OpenSolaris Community is an organization of individuals
>    # dedicated to the collaborative production of open source
>    # software related to the OpenSolaris family of operating systems
>    # and committed to fostering the evolution and adoption of the
>    # OpenSolaris code base. All software produced by the OpenSolaris
>    # Community shall be licensed to the public free of charge under
>    # one or more open source licenses approved by the Open Source
>    # Initiative.
>
> Which means that if someone wants to introduce proprietary code, it's
> defined to be outside our scope.  They're allowed (and perhaps even
> encouraged, depending on one's beliefs) to do so, but their activities
> aren't a part of our organisatiion and therefore we need not construct
> a nomenclature policy to accomodate them as an ordinary case.
>
> Examples:
>
> External Software Integration (porting and integrating Free and/or
> Open Source software developed elsewhere for use with or integration
> into OpenSolaris)
>
> Proprietary Vendor Outreach (advocacy of OpenSolaris as a platform for
> the development or porting of proprietary software)
>
> -- 
> Keith M Wesolowski		"Sir, we're surrounded!"
> FishWorks			"Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
>