that’s whacked

an OGB member’s dilemma

Sunday, Oct 28. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

Yeah, I’ve left Sun – but I’m still on the OGB, and I still care very much about OpenSolaris…

.. which is why this whole stupid naming/branding debate going on in various threads has me bothered.

O’grady has a good succinct summary along with his opinion on the matter. So here’s my dilemma. What is an OGB member’s duty? Is it to defend the interests of the community that’s grown up around OpenSolaris… or is it to grow the community more? The charter of the OGB which sets up this “federalised democracy” seems to set the powers of the OGB to be merely the appeals board for inter-Community conflicts. Which would imply that the responsibility of growing the community falls to the Advocacy Community… thus leaving the OGB to defend the interests of the community.

This is bullshit.

(in my personal, very humble, opinion)

I do believe (now) that the OGB should be responsible for leading and growing the OpenSolaris community more; the fact that we haven’t done so is a shame – but oh well. We’ve still got time. So, let’s go ahead and assume I disagree with the charter and think the OGB should assume more powers than it’s currently explicitly granted

I’m stuck with the dilemma of basically defending the community we have, versus growing to be the community we could be. I (now, though I didn’t initially) agree with all the proponents of the Indiana-should-be-OpenSolaris argument – for the reasons O’grady outlined. I think it decreases user confusion, and simplifies the messaging… hopefully that leads to wider adoption.

So herein lies the “defending the community we have” bit. I can very much see that there are people opposed to Indiana->OpenSolaris, as well as the people who support it. I don’t think that one side has more proponents than the other, so it’s decidedly unclear to me what the community voice is.

So what I hope for is that Sun will, as Ian outlined in his proposal, make this a community decision. While I’m fully aware that Sun owns the trademark, and has every legal right under the sun (har har, I made a funny) to rebrand Indiana as OpenSolaris, I think making a unilateral decision to do so would be quite a show of poor faith.

While, as I mentioned above, I support the rebranding, and I hope it succeeds – I hope even more that Sun will take into account what the community thinks and hold a community vote to decide. And even more importantly – I would hope they would abide by such a community decision. Some people will say that Sun should go ahead, do it, and suck up the inevitable backlash/blow that will occur (or heck, may not even occur). I think that Sun has not yet built up enough goodwill in the open source community (not for lack of effort on Sun’s part though) to do it though… and I think it would send a nasty message to future members of the community.

Anyway, this is definitely one of the more interesting debates going on in the OpenSolaris community – and I’m definitely torn trying to decide what my responsibilities (once again – assuming I have them) are to be.