☞ Communities and Control

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Simon Phipps
  • What community?
    If you’re interested in the Tizen project, take a look at Dave Neary’s well-founded scepticism. The whole project has the sound of a force-fit that will lead to a poor community experience. A poor community experience is often a symptom of deeper malaise that can mean project failure. I remember doing a similar double-take when I first looked at the Symbian proposals, guessing they were from a corporate mind rather than based on actual experience of open source communities.

  • OpenStack Foundation on the horizon
    Good overview of the dynamics of RackSpace’s Damascus Road conversion to wanting a Foundation for OpenStack. I have reliable sources telling me RackSpace was rushed into this by a prominent community member starting a foundation without RackSpace – presumably a fork under another name.
    I’m pleased RackSpace has learned from history and decided to do it themselves. That decision will make the community stronger, avoid unnecessary division and probably make RackSpace’s influence greater than they would have achieved by attempting to retain control. I hope Andy Oram is right and they do intend to build the governance by community consensus, though. In open source, trade control for influence, since control is illusory.

  • fOSSa 2011 Conference – Lyon, France, 26-27-28th October 2011
    I’ll be speaking at the end of day 2 of this conference. It’s free, please come along!

Also:

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4 Responses

  1. markcollier, on October 7, 2011 at 23:14 said:

    Simon,

    Thanks for the encouraging words regarding the OpenStack Foundation. A couple of clarifications:

    1) There is absolutely no truth to the claim that Rackspace made this move based on pressure from some mystery company wanting to fork the project. It’s really disappointing to see people spreading this kind of FUD. It’s rubbish.

    2) Rackspace has said since the very beginning that a foundation was the ultimate destination, and in fact at the last Design Summit 6 months ago Lew Moorman re-iterated this commitment in the governance discussion. The logical progression is happening, the timing feels right, and I think we can all agree that’s a great thing! I just hate to see misperceptions spread to the contrary.

    I really hope you can make it to our next Design Summit to witness the community at work first hand. The spirit of cooperation this week was never stronger, and the community quickly rallied to start the real work of defining a foundation.

    • Simon Phipps, on October 7, 2011 at 23:21 said:

      Thanks for commenting, Mark – very pleased to hear (1). As to (2), you have to remember I heard my bosses at Sun promise exactly the same for OpenOffice and never do it as well as promise Apache a Java license and never deliver it, so I am instinctively sceptical of corporate claims with no timeline, especially after seeing people like Rick quit.

      I am very pleased to hear the plan is to deliver sooner rather than later, though. Is it your plan to devise a governance that gets a high OBR score?

  2. Today’s Shared Links for October 7, 2011 @ Chuqui 3.0, on October 8, 2011 at 05:23 said:

    […] ☞ Communities and Control […]

  3. David, on October 13, 2011 at 07:35 said:

    The article on Jobs was interesting, the downward spiraling rant into hate speech was not as honoring to the memory of Jobs.

    By the way, we just lost Dennis Ritchie.
    http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2011/10/death-of-two-titans-jobs-and-ritchie.html

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