Unless i misunderstand, many people (Glyn, Simon, Ian, etc.) are now sounding like there was a misunderstanding on SUN’s assumptions of Opensolaris and community’s expectations.

I don’t believe Ray Fielding had accepted the constitutional work without understanding (read as: misunderstanding) SUN’s expections and promises about it.

Its funny to see all these SUN employees starting to support this misunderstanding argument, *after* Ray Fielding has resigned!

* institutionalizing governance before there is a community with a significant number of contributors outside Sun is a bad idea. Even if the governance arrived at is the best possible governance model ever devised by man, human nature dictates that contributors inside Sun will be tempted on every decision they make to take the short path of taking the discussion internally, rather than discussing it externally. Eventually including those decisions that matter to the community outside Sun.

* finishing governance before there is a significant number of contributors outside Sun is a bad idea: it draws a line in the sand where everyone who was too shy, busy, proprietary etc. to contribute is declared to have missed out on having their interests represented. Anyone arriving later at the game then needs to figure out if they agree with the governance, or if they’ll take their time and effort to fight it.

* You need a strategy to seed the community as widely as possible to include many different stake holders in the project, including those who pay Sun real, big money for open or closed Solaris. If your community and your customers don’t overlap at least a tiny bit, the community thing will be second priority to those that finance it.

* aiming for 100% governance prior to aiming for 100% open source means you are looking for a community of members more interested in open governance than open source. You get the community you shop for.

I’d hope that it’s just an issue of self fulfilling prophecy, where fear of massive public failure om every step in the way they open up their mission critical products is leading Sun’s management to a politician’s preferred strategy of carefully thinking things through, and picking the safest option: go for it slowly.

You might be right that bootstrapping a community has to be finished before the governance. However, I still think early in the process you need to be able to answer basic questions like ‘who can become a committer’ and ‘how are important technical decisions make?’

Governance is also something that changes and evolves; in fact good governance should allow for and define how change happens.

I really think Sun would solve a lot of their problems by being more upfront about a lot of these things.

Anyway… when Sun realizes that their shareholders include their community members and they aren’t just means to an end, things will change.

Taking 3+ years to bootstrap the OpenSolaris community seems like a lack of commitment but that is a completely different rant.