[Scooby] Re: [Cosmo] A couple big ideas: cosmo release and server project merge

[Ted Leung]

On Feb 3, 2006, at 10:27 AM, Brian Moseley wrote:

> i also think that this artificial separation has helped keep bobby and
> me from feeling empowered to contribute to each other's code. i know
> that sometimes i wake up with much more interest in what's going on
> with scooby that day than with cosmo, but because i'm not "on the
> scooby team", it doesn't feel right to offer to work on one of their
> tasks. similarly, bobby seems reluctant to get his hands dirty with
> the cosmo reports code, when he's currently the person to whom that
> code is most important, and indeed he understands how it's supposed to
> work much better than either me or bkirsch. so i think making us all
> part of one project with explicit commit access to the entire server
> svn repo, would address this. yes, i know that the scooby team could
> accept me as a committer and vice versa, but again, that seems
> artificial and overly complicated.

Actually, it's not.  When you have separate projects, it's a sign  
that the meritocracy is working correctly.   When Sun started  
contributing to Tomcat, their new hires did not automatically get  
commit privileges to CVS.   They had to earn them, just like  
everybody else.   We've already seen people who are reluctant to  
contribute because they feel that OSAF people are in some ways more  
privileged than they would be.

If we want to be regarded as a serious open source project that is  
committed to a diverse and empowered community, then we cannot keep  
making shortcuts for ourselves.

> so, just to be clear, i propose that we formally create an "osaf
> sharing server" project with cosmo and scooby as subprojects, with
> unified community tools, project wiki, and committer pool (with access
> to the entire server repo). cosmo, scooby, and snarf (probably
> renamed) continue to be separate bugzilla products and have separate
> process/planning docs (subsections of the wiki), but we integrate
> their installation docs and faqs and so forth to the extent that it
> makes sense.

The more I think about it, the more this seems like a shortcut.

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Ted Leung                 Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF)
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