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

[Shawn Walker]

On 25/09/2007, Stephen Lau <stevel at sun.com> wrote:
> James C. McPherson wrote:
> > Stephen Lau wrote:
> >> Darren Reed 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;
> >>
> >> While this is a noteworthy long-term goal, I fail to see what problems
> >> this solves in the short-term.
> >>
> >> Who will own them?  Who will maintain them?  Who will be paid to
> >> maintain them?
> >
> >
> > Who owns, runs and maintains kernel.org?
>
> kernel.org isn't much more than a download site.
>
> > Dare I suggest slashdot, sourceforge and even OSNews as
> > examples here?
>
> I don't believe /. & osnews establish communities.
> Sourceforge is probably a more relevant example, but Sourceforge creates
> micro-communities with hardly any attempt to have cross-project
> communication.
>
> opensolaris.org is attempting to be everything (or at least all-things
> OpenSolaris related) to everyone, and I would argue that that is
> probably its fallacy.
>
> There is no *single* Linux community site, why should there need to be a
> single opensolaris.org site?  Frankly, I think it'd be good for the
> health of our community if people did take stuff elsewhere and do
> interesting things on their own.

Isn't that part of the "Linux problem" though? Hasn't the "Linux
world" (which doesn't have a "unified" place the community can call
home) fractured into a "bajillion" communities, websites, and
distributions leading to uncoordinated, wasted efforts?

I think Ubuntu proved how valuable having a centralized user
community, bug tracking, repository, etc. can be.

It's the same model that many other projects have as well (FreeBSD, etc.).

-- 
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