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Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:44:51 -0500
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Subject: Re: TDF/LO, what is the art of the possible?
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On 6/4/2011 7:37 AM, robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:
> 
> It is not relevant how ASF would answer these questions. 

You see, I think it is, and apparently other mentors do as well...

> I'm open to to possibility that a 6-month old open source association with 
> a single project might have more flexibility, as an organization, than 
> ASF, a 12-year old foundation, with a legal entity and nearly 170 
> projects.   Note that in this case I am talking specifically about the 
> organization, not the collective membership.  That is why I explicitly 
> directed the questions to the TDF Steering Committee, asking for an 
> official response.   I think this would be very useful. 

What you describe with respect to 'negotiations' on these points is what
the officers of the ASF would generally defer to the project/ASF members,
or not entertain at all as 'official positions'.

You approached this survey, in my reading, as an inquiry to a division
head, CTO or VP Engineering.  Open source, including the ASF and also
TDF, is not managed in the hierarchical fashion that your questions seem
to be directed to.

There was perhaps an opportunity for the small pool of TDF folks to have
made adjustments (in fact, LGPL+MPL seems to be just one of these) at the
very early stage when they were defining themselves, before inviting the
world to participate in their umbrella with some definitions of what that
umbrella was made of and what color it was painted.

There was perhaps a second opportunity for the small pool of TDF folks to
have made adjustments, prior to the announcement by Oracle, which might
have compelled them to make changes justified by their interest in
accepting stewardship of the code under terms Oracle insists on.

But once users are invited to manage a community, and do so effectively,
the management/decision making process flattens.  Six months was more
than enough time for TDF to make this transition, and it appears you
no longer have a TDF management to negotiate with, but the community of
contributors now unified under certain precipts.  Everything is public
now, and it will be up to the TDF community to make the hard decisions.
I don't expect TDF's officers to make such public decisions without input
from community, be it polls, votes, discussion threads as we are having
here, or whatnot.

You could ask these questions of RedHat management, or Novell management,
but in asking this of "open source management" suggests to me that there
is a serious disconnect in your understanding of meritocratic, open source
software development as practiced at the ASF, at least.

So what I wanted to communicate to you is that asking these questions of
"the Management of TDF Project" is insulting to the individual members
of their community.  This poll is written to divide and put stakes in the
ground, not to find common ground.  This ASF incubation effort begs for
some contribution by those same individuals, so your questionnaire seems
counterproductive and destined to add antagonism, rather than remove some,
and I'd suggest you withdraw it.


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