[ogb-discuss] [opensolaris-summit] My comments (very subjective) on proposed Summit topics

[Shawn Walker]

On 25/09/2007, Darren Reed <Darren.Reed at sun.com> wrote:
> Keith M Wesolowski wrote:
>
> >...
> >It's not bureaucracy (why does everyone think there's so much of it?
> >Do you know what the word actually means?) but a lack of adequate
> >infrastructure that makes contributing such a pain.  I blame Sun for
> >this; its insistence on maintaining control of the infrastructure and
> >its tortuous legal and policy constraints are a main reason more
> >progress has not been made.  That said, anyone could put together a
> >proposal to move all this outside Sun's control and accelerate the
> >process, yet no one has.  It's unclear whether that's because of
> >laziness, lack of interest, or lack of means.
> >
> >
>
> There are a number of things that need to happen here and
> they've been raised before (at least by myself):
>
> 1) move the opensolaris machinery (web server, repository,
>    etc) away from being owned by Sun;

Sounds great, but who pays for it?

What benefit would it have for us?

What's stopping someone from starting up a fork and doing this
themselves right now?

> 2) to achieve (1), create an opensolaris entity that can own
>    pieces of hardware, etc;
>
> 3) in order to fund both (1) and (2), make an opensolaris
>    entity that is a non profit organisation.

You talk about project success all the time, but the things you talk
about are not the things I think it needs to succeed right now. From
my perspective as a indepdenent, non-Sun affiiliated person, your
proposals would just burn energy on things now that is better directed
at more important issues.

I don't think the issues that are facing us right now would be solved
by what you are proposing.

However, they are all great goals to have for a future date, despite
the challenges in achieving them.

> If we were a true bona-fide opensource project and with a bit
> of luck, we can get a server into a back-bone ISP's colocation
> facility using 1RU or less of space.

"bona-fide"...interesting terminology. What exactly is the "accepted
definition" of "bona-fide opensource project".

> But, now that OpenSolaris is open, if there were enough interested
> parties we could build a new distribution that we all worked on
> (with a new name) with the model *we* want and just leave
> OpenSolaris in Sun's hands.  We can still pull in code from OS.o,
> after it gets mirrored there from nevada.
>
> Heck, maybe we participants should just do that anyway, rather
> than wait for Sun to work out what it wants to do with OS.o?

What's stopping someone from doing this now?

Personally, I don't see a community division as the "Right Thing To
Do" at the moment.

I think divided efforts would hurt us even more.

I'm fairly frustrated with the progress in certain areas, but I'm not
ready to "throw the baby out with the bath water" just yet...

-- 
Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it. " --Donald Knuth