Matthew Garrett: “[I]f you create procedures before you create community, the people who end up enforcing the procedures tend to be the sort of people who find enforcing procedures to be the interesting part of the job rather than the ones who see them as necessary evils to enforce moderately sensible community development.”
There’s one huge problem with his assumption.
He is assuming that there was no community before the proposal, which is wrong.
The OpenSolaris community is almost two years old now.
There was a community *before* the proposal was made, hence the expectation to follow the procedures.
No, Shawn, you’re missing the point. The procedures in question are the ones put in place two years ago. Try reading his argument again with this in mind.
– Chris
Wow, this quote nails the situation so directly it’s insane. The opensolaris community from day one has felt like a bureaucrat’s wet dream and I suspected the project would not make any headway into the outside open source community. Unfortunately, I was correct. :( I am still hoping this will change, but baroque procedures and policies are often more difficult to remove than to install.
@ Chris
No, I am not missing the point. My statement stands. I have been part of this community since day one, I was one of the initial people to sign an SCA and become a registered contributor. His wording is totally inaccurate.
Ian — Before asserting that OpenSolaris hasn’t developed much of a community, you should read some of the monthly newsletters Jim Grisanzio (OpenSolaris Community Manager) has been maintaining
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/content/newsletter
Then if you still want to make that assertion, at least have the courtesy to do it to Jim’s face so he can respond. Trust me though, you’ll come out looking worse than foolish, as there are mountains (Everest-size ones) of evidence to the contrary.
I am so happy to see someone with some weight repeating what I thought was the most phenomenal sentence on planet.debian I ever remember reading. How succinct and correct!
I’m not asserting that OpenSolaris hasn’t developed much of a community. Quite the contrary, it’s large and vibrant. I’m asserting that the large and vibrant OpenSolaris community is expending energy on the wrong thing, namely process. Process is a means, not an end. -ian
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