[ogb-discuss] today's meeting

[James Carlson]

Eric Boutilier writes:
> On Wed, 2 May 2007, James Carlson wrote:
> > I'm off to a doctor's appointment right now.  I hope to be back in
> > time for the conference call, but if not, I hope some time will be
> > spent talking about the communities that might be too *big* to have
> > focus, such as the "networking" community.
> >
> > Much of the clean-up effort to date seems to have been focussed on
> > merging together communities that are too small/narrow, but I think we
> > have the same kind of problem with too-big ones.  A community that
> > could sponsor "everything" ends up in fact directing "nothing."
> 
> This strikes me as very compatible with the stevel/bmc point that the best
> kind of community is one that is big, mature, and vibrant around something
> (an industry technology, a Solaris feature, etc.) in an organic kind of
> way. It would seem that Networking (for example) is such an immensely
> broad and general "thing" it's not conducive to that.

Yes, that's the point exactly.  There are an extremely broad array of
things that fit in "networking" but that aren't significantly related.
For example, IS-IS versus SMTP or SIP versus packet filtering.
There's no reason I can see to suppose that those things would somehow
be directed together.

The actual underlying cause of the problem that I see is that the
communities as originally instantiated reflected organizational
boundaries within Sun, rather than anything important about the
technology.  Every director or VP needs to have his own community.  I
suspect this is still a common expectation, and I think we probably
need to get away from that idea.

Examples of oddities in this area abound, including the way SNMP,
HTTP, and even NFS are classified.  I'm not sure they all need to be
reshuffled right this minute, or even that dual-homed things (such as
those) can't just pick a home, but having a plan for where we'd like
to end up would be nice.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive         71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax +1 781 442 1677