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Date: Sun, 04 Sep 2011 17:54:04 +0100
From: Terry Ellison <Terry@ellisons.org.uk>
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To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: Dissatisfaction amongst the community admins, moderators and
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On 04/09/11 17:22, Simon Phipps wrote:
> On Sep 4, 2011 5:14 PM, "Rob Weir"<robweir@apache.org>  wrote:
>> Another thing to note is that the existing forum volunteers do not
>> "own" the support forums.  They do not operate autonomously.
> Are you sure? I believe they do.
+1 to Simons view  -1 to Rob.

AFAIK, A Sun admin has logged onto this services maybe half-a-dozen 
times to install the base O/S and Coolstack years ago, and no "Oracle" 
Oracle-employed admin has ever done so.  Coolstack is years out of date 
for this reason.   I (assisted by Drew in the early days) do all of the 
root admin as well as run the Forums.

They have always been autonomous from the OOo project organisation 
hierarchy.  The initial decision to allow their creation in the first 
place was more of a Sun one than an OOo project one -- as the project 
didn't see the need to have a working User Community and Sun did and 
provided the box for us to run our service on, though in later years the 
project came to value the role that the forums have played.

So from day 1 the forums have always been autonomous.  And one key 
driver here was so that the community could have the freedom to 
up-sticks and take their knowledge elsewhere should the relationship 
break down -- our primary allegiance and service duty is to the end-user 
community, and not to a development project.  The last friction was over 
the whole issue of whether the forums should continue to support 
non-Oracle variants such as LibreOffice, which it did and still does 
against some then strong Oracle opinions.

I think that both Drew and I have said this on a number of occasions.  
To demand that the community unilaterally surrender such autonomy 
without reasonable engagement is a pretty sure way IMHO to force them to 
consider the "new home" option.  Despite all of the hassle over the last 
few days, my preference would be to vote to stay, but I am only one 
voice in what I think is currently a minority opinion.