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

[Jim Grisanzio]

Joerg Schilling wrote:

> After it looked as it Sun did like to dominate OpenSolaris, I did 
> ask to create a constitution an s government board in November 2004.
> I did this because I wanted to make sure that we will not get a similar
> situation as with Linux wehre Torvalds dominates all decisions.
> 
> There was a hard discussion and I was attacked and told that this will never 
> work.
> 
> Later (in January 2005) people from Sun started to offer the same as their 
> idea......


There were many people who had ideas about boards -- corporate boards, 
partner/customer boards, community boards, elections, non-elected 
appointees, no board at all. But you are correct in that we really 
didn't focus on this to any great extent in our external communications 
or even with the pilot project until Jan 05 when we released DTrace and 
announced the CDDL. The intention to form the CAB was part of that 1/05 
announcement, and I think we didn't communicate it well at all and we 
didn't involve the pilot early enough, either. Point taken. I remember 
that time and I was pretty pissed about it. But I don't think anyone 
intended to take your ideas. :)


> Now we have it and my impression is that it's main problem is missing 
> visibility. Missing visibility results in missing interest.


I think Keith outlined beautifully the CAB-OGB sequence -- all of which 
was pretty darn visible. I can also remember pinging opensolaris-discuss 
on various CAB issues and getting very little response. Interest in 
governance was always rather low. But if that's increasing now than 
that's cool. Remember, the CAB/OGB was never intended to be a high 
profile, operational organization for OpenSolaris engineering and 
community development. It was designed as a bootstrap to get us going 
with a foundational structure. And it did just that. Future elections 
will determine how/if its current role changes.

Jim
-- 
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris