[os-infrastructure] The infrastructure

Tue Jun 10 06:56:00 PDT 2008

Andrew, 

Everyone is very happy at what you are doing to engage the Ingres
community.  The activity that you have outlined is very important.

However, what you are doing is only part of what needs to be done to
make Ingres a successful open source company.  There are at least two
additional things that are equally important: (1) We need to clearly
understand and adopt a development model that takes into account the
needs of our commercial products and allows the acceptance of
contributions externally and (2) Out internal processes and procedures
need a very close examination and review with the goal of introducing
changes that allow us to take advantage of the opportunity that open
source affords us.

These two items can be investigated somewhat independent of the tools
that are ultimately chosen.  The new open source procedures and
processes are just a relevant for someone using Piccolo and Bugs for
there open source work as they are for someone using Subversion and
Trac.  This has been the message that we have tried to present on this
email list from the beginning.

I want to have the OpenROAD group take their open source discussion
offline for a few weeks so that we can have an OpenROAD open source
specific exchange. We will return with our ideas on how we plan to
manage OpenROAD in the open source world in about a month.  At that
point I will welcome any feedback, criticism and suggestions on our
proposal.

Meanwhile, continue doing what you are doing.  It is an important piece
of the puzzle.

...Signing off until July 7, 2008

Durwin Wright | Sr. Architect | Durwin.Wright at ingres.com | Ingres | 500
Arguello Street | Suite 200 | Redwood City | CA | 94063 | USA  +1
650-587-5523 | fax: +1 650-587-5550 

-----Original Message-----
From: opensource-infrastructure-bounces at lists.ingres.com
[mailto:opensource-infrastructure-bounces at lists.ingres.com] On Behalf Of
Andrew Ross
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 4:16 AM
To: Discussions about the infrastructure needed to support a true
opensourcecommunity
Subject: RE: [os-infrastructure] The infrastructure

Thanks for the clarification Bodo.

That's where I think you're unfairly simplifying my message. As early as
February we discussed this and I was very clear that changing culture,
policy, procedures takes time and is risky. In the meantime, we had
nothing. Community couldn't even get started and we weren't doing much
about bringing in new community members. 

Now we have a place where they can download code. We've automated
setting up an dbms instance to make it one command. We've done work to
make the tests run on any machine rather than just our internal
machines. We have a public bug tracker, code browser, list of projects
posted, etc. We're working on ensuring our code builds on major
community platforms such as Fedora, Ubuntu, MacOS, etc. All of this is
work that needed to be done independent of what our policy becomes. Do
you agree?

Beyond this, we've been engaging Universities to bring in interns and
faculty members. We've been running public events like bootcamp. We've
been pairing with other open source companies to find common interest.
We've been engaging with Eclipse and OSGeo to find common interests.
Work in this area is aimed at bringing new people to the community and
helping them be successful. Again, this work needs to be done
independent of policy decisions. Do you agree?

Andrew 

-----Original Message-----
From: opensource-infrastructure-bounces at lists.ingres.com
[mailto:opensource-infrastructure-bounces at lists.ingres.com] On Behalf Of
Bodo Bergmann
Sent: June 10, 2008 4:23 AM
To: Discussions about the infrastructure needed to support a true
opensourcecommunity
Subject: RE: [os-infrastructure] The infrastructure

Andrew,

you wrote:
"I suppose I was surprised by the negative reaction from some and let
the frustration show when they dismissed the work done to date."

I don't think that any of the fair comments (or even harsh critisism)
made in this discussion had the objective to disregard your work.
I personally think you are doing a great job in building up a technical
infrastructure.

But there are some points to be questioned, one of them is
"communication".
The world-techinfo list (which includes Engineering, QA, Support, etc.)
is a much better place to announce new mailing lists, etc. than
word-of-mouth advertising (or c.d.i news). It's ok to do it more
"private" if it's just a research project, but once you want it to be
accepted within the company or even the whole community, then it should
be communicated accordingly.

Anyway, I think this is not the biggest issue, I believe that the
criticism is more for the general approach taken by the company rather
than by yourself. And for that matter our senior management is
responsible.

The whole "we have to be Open Source, that's why we have to get out the
tools first"
strategy is the focus of the critic.

It's like a strategy for "The kid has to be mobile" of:
"Ok, give him a new car first - and assign someone to add the nice
features and gadgets, so the kid can really impress his peers" and
"Let's think about driving lessons later".
This way you create a wonderful car which becomes a dangerous weapon in
the hands of the kid.
So, what's wrong about sending the kid to driving school first?
Once he has finished it he is able to drive a car.
This can be the fully featured new car or, if it isn't available yet or
too expensive, take a used car - at least he is mobile without putting
other people at risk.

So, Andrew, please continue to build and tune the car (infrastructure) -
let it become the Mercedes under the OpenSource community tools. :) But
I still think that the driving instructions (the "plan", the
codeline(s) model, etc.)
are more important to start with.

Bodo.

-----Original Message-----
From: opensource-infrastructure-bounces at lists.ingres.com
[mailto:opensource-infrastructure-bounces at lists.ingres.com] On Behalf Of
Andrew Ross
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 2:48 AM
To: Discussions about the infrastructure needed to support a true
opensourcecommunity
Subject: [os-infrastructure] The infrastructure

Hi All,

Alex mentioned I had a confrontational tone in some of my emails and I
wanted to explain to perhaps clarify why.

A lot of time, effort, and thought went into identifying realistic
things we could accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. This doesn't
mean we don't need to change the culture. This doesn't mean we don't
need new procedures. And it doesn't mean we don't need to examine our
business model against what we plan to do with open source. 

Much of what we've done was badly needed. We've had some very positive
complements from external people saying it's about time and they were
very pleased with how easily they pulled down the code, built it, and
got a DBMS instance running. We've even had a fair number of internal
people saying hallelujah.

I suppose I was surprised by the negative reaction from some and let the
frustration show when they dismissed the work done to date. 

I am hoping that others will seize the opportunity and work to build on
what we've done. The climb towards success in our open source community
is not going to be a revolution over night. It will be an evolution over
time. It will not be accomplished by waiting for senior management to do
all the work but rather endorsed by senior management once we come up
with a recommendation.

Thank you to those that volunteered in private. From my list, the
merging improvements and syncing could use an extra set of hands.

Andrew
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