[ogb-discuss] Device Driver Community

[Roy T. Fielding]

On May 4, 2007, at 1:25 AM, Alan DuBoff wrote:
> On Thu, 3 May 2007, Keith M Wesolowski wrote:
>
>> Not at all; a Core Contributor is exactly what the Constutition says
>> it is.
>
> To be honest, it doesn't say much at all. What is the point in  
> having Core Contributers and/or Contributers might I ask? Other  
> than voting rights, it doesn't seem there's much meat to it.

One of the most important things for open source projects is to properly
acknowledge contributions.  In many ways, it is the only thanks that
anyone gets for contributing toward the goals of the group.  It is also
essential for tracking intellectual property claims when they occur
(and they *will* occur, even for a nonprofit like Apache).  The
Contributor category and associated requirements exist to document
the responsibility of Groups for maintaining a list of credits.

The Core Contributor category is to identify the people who are able
to make decision for the Group and to emphasize that we want the
people doing the most work (or having invested the most time) to be
the ones responsible for making decisions, rather than just whoever
writes to the mailing list today.

....

>> There is no requirement that a Core Contributor have a record of
>> putting back to any particular consolidation, or even a project gate.
>
> Yeah, in reading the text of the constitution there is really  
> nothing that such a status would do, other than voting  
> rights...whopee...Some communities have more than a dozen  
> contributers, like user groups for instance.

Note that there are a lot more ways to contribute than simply coding.
It is difficult to list them all, so we left it wide open.

> On the website itself, what is called a leader is merely a person  
> that can edit the pages of the community. That should be changed, a  
> leader implies much more than being able to edit. Just because  
> someone needs to edit doesn't mean they need to be a leader.
>
> I would encourage the OGB to draft up some type of guidelines and/ 
> or change the name of "leaders" to "editors" possibly, it's confusing.

I agree.

>> Not at all.  The consolidations are not mentioned by the  
>> Constitution,
>> an unfortunate shortcoming we'll be working to address.

As an "outsider", my perspective was that the notion of consolidation
and the products grouped into consolidations were both completely
arbitrary accidents of business reorganizations within Sun.  Even
after all this time, the current consolidation structure makes no sense
to me.  That is why they aren't in the constitution.  I figured it
would be better to leave it unspecified than to write something into
the constitution for which I did not understand the rationale, let alone
the desired structure for opensolaris.

AFAICT, consolidation just means a release management process for a
given set of products.  In my opinion, that should be a project of the
community that owns that product(s).  However, I am sure that you guys
have a much better handle on how consolidations coordinate work in
practice (at least from the perspective of Solaris releases), so you
are in a much better position to define it correctly than the CAB.

If OpenSolaris were producing a distribution, then I'd suggest a
single consolidation structure along the lines of Ubuntu Linux.
In other words, a distribution community that is responsible for
overlapping "release" projects that terminate every six months.
Then the individual product releases (managed by each product's
community) would be independent from the overall release project.
But, YMMV.

....Roy