[os-infrastructure] The infrastructure

[Joe Abbate]

Joe Abbate wrote:
> IMHO, Ingres Corporation is somewhat atypical of open source 
> companies.  If you look at say the top 30 projects by stack popularity 
> at http://www.ohloh.net/projects, you'll find maybe only a couple that 
> are directly controlled by a for-profit company.  Most projects are 
> "staffed" by individuals working on their own free time, on the time 
> of non-profit foundations (created explicitly by the projects), or on 
> sponsoring-company time.  The latter is when a for-profit company 
> tells an employee he or she can spend a substantial amount of 
> company-paid time (30% or more) on the FOSS project.  Usually, the 
> sponsoring company provides services related to the project software 
> so allowing that work on company time is in lieu of contributing funds 
> to the foundation or project organization.  However, the companies 
> typically do not simultaneously "sell" the software under a license 
> that forbids the client to "modify or create derivative works" or 
> "reverse-engineer ... or attempt to derive the source code".  IMO, 
> this requires walking a fine line and I hesitate to make assumptions 
> as to what senior management would like to see happen or how soon it 
> should happen.

I just finished going over Roy Hahn's "Ingres Janitors" presentation at 
the summit, and found two significant points:

* Emma secured a small commitment of development resources
  -  to implement an open code repository, bug-tracking, communications, 
and mentoring for janitors and apprentices
  - and for community events.

What we seem to have been discussing in this list goes much further than 
"a small commitment" but is rather a complete change in our internal 
development procedures, i.e., switching our source code management 
software, Bugs, etc.

* Current thinking is that a vibrant and active community will want to 
be free from commercial priorities
* Product could fork (bifurcate)
* The community version is expected to drift ahead of the commercial version
   - ?possibly acquire a distinct name

The above has *major* implications.  CentOS (the example given by Roy) 
"is not maintained or supported by Red Hat" (Wikipedia) and their home 
page doesn't even recognize Red Hat (referring to it only as "a 
prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor").  Do we or more 
importantly does the Ingres board want an Ingres fork?  If so, will they 
be willing to fund or staff such an effort?

Joe