[Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] SoaS: Searching for Decision Panel volunteers.

[David Nalley]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 5:18 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> As a parallel, Linux Caixa Mágica is the name for a product, Caixa
> Mágica Software the name of the company behind it, and its community
> is called Caixa Mágica Community. Though the community can submit
> packages for approval and distribution, my understanding is that most
> of the distro work is done by employees at Caixa Mágica Software.
>
> They have actually changed once from OpenSUSE to Mandriva as the base
> of their distro, but in that case I would expect that the company just
> decided it internally and its employees just stopped working on one
> code base and started using the other. AFAIK, no names were changed,
> nor for the product, nor the company, nor the community. I bet some
> people in the community didn't liked it, some might have left it, but
> that didn't affected the continuity of the project.
>
> The crucial difference to our situation is that we have a team for
> every distro and chances are that those working on one are not going
> to switch teams and start using another distro as the base of their
> work.

I think there is a more important difference here. In Caixa Mágica the
work was done by paid employees, and decisions made by management. The
employees have to conform to those decisions to continue getting paid.
In a free software community, ideally the decisions are made by those
doing the work. When those who aren't doing the work mandate change it
often goes very poorly (which is why I think there are decision panels
for cases where SLOBs are not intimately familiar with the details and
workings of a particular issue..) As Bernie pointed out, it doesn't
matter to the end user. However, one must be careful to avoid the trap
of thinking that this is like a business and the end user/customer is
the only concern. This is a community, and the contributors to the
community are pretty important, if not most important in the equation,
because without contributors, work tends to cease.

I ran through all of that to end up saying, this seems like a
non-issue. Other distributions are working on packaging and
distributing Sugar, and that's great. However, no one else seems to be
putting the same level of work in as Sebastian and the rest of the
SoaS contributors are to keep very close to upstream and stay very
involved with upstream. As others have noted SoaS is currently the
defacto LiveUSB platform for Sugar, and there don't seem to be many
competitors, so what's the issue with making it official? When a
'competitor' comes along that is willing to do the same work, perhaps
then it will be time to evaluate things (on technical merits).

I'll close with another community example - postgresql.org. Postgres
has a LiveCD that is based on Fedora. Is it because Postgres is a
Fedora project, or that all of the developers use Fedora?? No. Is it
because it runs best on Fedora? again no. It's because a member of the
postgres community, Devrim Gunduz, is willing to invest the time to
build the LiveCD with each subsequent release and does so on Fedora
and no one else is doing comparable work (I should note that Devrim
did change from Fedora to CentOS for the most recent LiveCD just a few
days ago, and as predicted, no on cares, but the point is, the person
doing the work made that decision)

Is SoaS the official SL.o Live Environment? Might as well be, because
it's already the defacto choice, and no one else is stepping up to
offer anything different.