[os-infrastructure] The infrastructure

[Andrew Ross]

Hi Joe,

What Roy & I described were consistent. What we tried to do was clear.
What we weren't trying to do may not have been clear on this list.

What has come up on this list beyond infrastructure, deep into the
policy and even stretching into our fundamental business model is not
what we were trying to accomplish. We were clear about *not* touching
culture and policy in many discussions and emails since January. I
should have done a better job articulating that here. 

Had we waited for the policy to be settled, it would likely be at least
a year, possibly more. It is debatable that we even need to change the
company drastically. However, it was clear that we needed better
infrastructure so that people could download and build the code on major
platforms without investing 2 weeks (as Roger pointed out) or they could
have a place to put & see bugs from other community members. 

Unfortunately couldn't find a reasonable alternative to creating yet
more redundancy for bug tracking. I believe that is still the case
today. Service desk is entrenched but only acceptable for paying
customers (apparently). Again, we could decide to sort out an impossible
mission, or go with a compromise for now knowing it may be replaced.

I mentioned in my talk that we have the option of running the systems in
parallel, or moving towards a single code repository & bug tracker. The
consensus from many people was that we should move to a single system.
After some testing and analysis, the consensus was updated to be that we
should run in parallel until we decide we need to do otherwise. I
believe we've had consensus that we should move towards open source
tools in the future. This is a pragmatic position as development tools
are commodity.

Releasing early, even with compromises and work arounds is very much in
the spirit of open source. This is what we've done. I am really grateful
to the many people who made this happen and continue to use and enhance
the environment.


Now, on the policy side:

When it comes down to the core of what we want as a company is to enable
others to do what is in their best interest and have this bring value to
the Ingres ecosystem. Those actions/best interests and the value they
generate will be different depending on who's involved. As a couple of
examples: Partners will want to go to market together and make money.
Students will want to learn about RDBMS technology, OSS, software
development, and system administration. Employees will want interesting
and gainful employment. It appears to me that this is happening and
we're getting better at doing it well.

Personally, as I said in P.C., I'd like to see innovative, risky, or
experimental work done in subversion with the community invited in. I
don't see this as forking to code as much as stable vs. development
branches. 

Our current policies about releasing patches or source post GA, etc.
likely can stay put until we sort out if there's a better way worth
going after.

I *do* think we'd be better served if we found a way to organize our
efforts better. Perhaps a goal per quarter. For instance, have this
quarter be all about polishing up the environment, defining any missing
procedures, and getting the build clean on major platforms. :-)

Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: opensource-infrastructure-bounces at lists.ingres.com
[mailto:opensource-infrastructure-bounces at lists.ingres.com] On Behalf Of
Joe Abbate
Sent: June 12, 2008 5:11 PM
To: Discussions about the infrastructure needed to support a true open
sourcecommunity
Subject: Re: [os-infrastructure] The infrastructure

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
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