[illumos-Discuss] Why did we fork Illumos? [Re: [osol-discuss] gdamore wishes he knew what would motivate more developers to work on illumos bugs....]

[Knut Reinert]

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Bryan Cantrill <bryancantrill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 6:48 AM, Gleb Kursou <kursou.gleb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Forwarded conversation
>> Subject: gdamore wishes he knew what would motivate more developers to
>> work on illumos bugs....
>> ------------------------
>>
>> From: Gleb Kursou <kursou.gleb at gmail.com>
>> Date: Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 3:24 PM
>> To: discuss at lists.illumos.org, opensolaris-discuss at opensolaris.org
>> Cc: garrett at damore.org
>>
>>
>> Garrett, so you asked this question: "gdamore wishes he knew what
>> would motivate more developers to work on illumos bugs...."
>>
>> I keep it short - and public - to start a discussion about how the
>> Illumos gate should be managed. I - and many other people - think the
>> biggest problem is *your* own behavior. This can be solved but
>> requires a huge leap from you *first*. You need to work on your
>> behavior towards people.
>
> Actually, Adam Leventhal (Delphix) and I each (separately) gave
> answers to this question on behalf of our organizations -- and the
> reason that we haven't contributed has to do much more with the fact
> that our teams are still ramping up, and not at all with Garrett's
> style. Further, I don't find your tone to be at all productive; if you
> have such strong disagreements with illumos, start your own fork

Nah, a fork would only be necessary if the disagreements between
persons or goals is unresolvable.

But hey, we did fork Illumos.
Why?

Because we've observed Garrett D'Amore and Illumos over the course of
two months beginning with September 2010 and our conclusion is that we
can't join forces with Illumos at the current time if we wish to spend
money from German and EU funding pools. One side has praised Garrett
as good engineer but we have more than one side which describe him as
"loose cannon" and the next Theo de Raadt, both which partially fit in
our judgment when evaluating his management of Illumos affairs, his
treatment of contributors and his tight, single-person control of the
whole project. We don't want to have the same issue as DARPA had with
Mr. Raadt and sink money and whole projects upon a single disagreement
with a single person. What we need is a stable, open, meritocratic
basis for cooperation based on shared control of the project and we
have strong doubts if this will ever happen with Mr. D'Amore. We won't
receive funding, even if we try to ignore the issues ourselves,
because a simple analysis of the state of the Illumos project from the
sides of DFG and CERN's project management has lead to similar
conclusions. Therefore we had no choice and fork. We would be happy to
join in the future but first Illumos must prove itself and that it can
grow beyond being the project controlled by a single person. No
manager likes single point of failures.

Knut