that’s whacked

Dear Sun, learn to trust your own community.

Thursday, Jan 15. 2009  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Sun

Dear Sun,

I feel like we have trust issues.  Everytime I think we start to be good, and do good things… you go and do something to turn a good thing bad.  Let’s take this latest case of your “Free CD” button at the top of the OpenSolaris.org homepage.  I know you meant well… but see, you actually came out looking like… well, kind of an asshat jerk.

I’m really disappointed that you have, yet again, chosen to blatantly disregard the community process setup by the OpenSolaris Governing Board, in partnership with Sun representatives themselves.

To be clear, I think a free CD button is not a bad idea.  While I disagree with the current page (let’s throw a big blank looking page with a login that doesn’t use the same login as the previous page!), I think the concept isn’t bad.  I’m all for furthering adoption of OpenSolaris technologies.

What I think is a huge wad of community FAIL is how you’ve trampled all over the process that you yourself helped setup.  I’m of course, talking about the website review process.  The OGB chartered the Website Community Group to own the homepage.  Informally, the Website CG was given the responsibility (on behalf of the entire OpenSolaris.org membership) of updating the homepage with fresh content.

You’ve screwed up quite a few times before… the first time resulted in the establishment of a Website Editorial Board (which became a Review Committee) to review changes made to the homepage of OpenSolaris.org.  The second time resulted in Sun having a “Sponsored Links” section of the homepage where it could freely publish content without having it go through review.  Through both of these incidents, we communicated with you via the Sun/OGB liason, and worked out a policy and process agreeable to all parties.

We know the review process works because the Website CG (courtesy of content leader Michelle Olson) formulates, reviews, and publishes content every month in a timely and successful fashion.  The Website CG follows the process, and gets things done.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m finding it harder and harder to trust you these days with respect to anything that might require community input.  For every good thing you do with open source (GPL OpenOffice?  Great!), you shoots itself in the foot on others (sh*t on the community?  Boo!).

So here’s an open letter to the nameless executives pulling the puppet strings from behind the curtain: please… just follow the process that YOU agreed to.  It’s not hard.  It’s quite easy.  Your own employees are quite familiar with it.  Trust your employees, your engineers, and better yet… start to trust in your community.  You’d receive far less backlash and hate if you actually played by the rules that you yourself laid down.

Love,

Your biggest fan, Steve.