[ogb-discuss] Re: DTrace & MDB OpenSolaris communities

[Eric Boutilier]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2007, Bryan Cantrill wrote:
>
>> My test is this: if someone were to go to opensolaris-discuss and
>> propose DTrace or mdb now - would it be classified as a project, or as a
>> community?  If someone proposed another debugger, let's say "ndb", or
>> someone proposed to port (god forbid) SystemTap to Solaris (ignore GPL
>> issues, this is hypothetical) - would we grant them a community?  No, we
>> would say it's a project.
>>
>> So this seems to suggest that we need a path for "promoting" projects to
>> be communities once they have reached some threshold.
>
> I agree.  In fact, part of the reason that I _don't_ want DTrace to
> be in the Observability community is that in the presence of say, a
> SystemTap port to Solaris (shudder), it makes absolutely no sense for
> SystemTap and DTrace to be in the same Community -- because they're
> very much _not_ in the same community.  (A more current example would
> be ZFS and QFS, the communities of which are largely orthogonal.)
>
>> So maybe we give up the idea of uniformity in classification of
>> communities/projects - and say *everything* starts as a project until it
>> reaches said threshold at which point it becomes a community with
>> governance?  It lends itself to more organic growth, which seems to be
>> the feedback I've been receiving here.
>
> Organic is good -- you don't want to be too rigid about the definition
> of Community and Project.  That said, there _is_ a distinction in the
> Constitution and it's unfortunate that we have overloaded the term
> "community" with a governance definition.  It means that you either have
> to (1) give every self-organizing community the right to determine the
> fate of OpenSolaris or (2) tell some self-organizing community that,
> while they might be a community, they are not, in fact, a Community.
> Both paths are problematic, though if one must choose only between these
> stark choices are would rather empower too many (overly inclusive) than
> empower too few (overly exclusive).
>
> But I think the notion of starting everything out as a project and
> promoting accordingly is a good one.

I like this too for all the reasons given, and it alleviates my initial
concern about consistency (as viewed by the uninitiated, that is). The
paradigm above basically avoids the "first glance" concern I mentioned
because there wouldn't be a clear pattern of things that have product
technology names tend to be projects and things that have industry
generality names tend to be communities, which is concpetually where we
were headed.

Plus it avoids the first-order test too, which I don't like because it
assumes an OpenSolaris centric perspective.

Eric

> And I would also recommend a third
> moniker for user groups, which I think is a large part of the governance
> problem (like, say, User Group), but I imagine that that will require
> constitutional modifications...
>
> 	- Bryan
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Bryan Cantrill, Solaris Kernel Development.       http://blogs.sun.com/bmc
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