Re: [CentOS] Community voice (was [CentOS-announce] Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1503 ) on x86_64)
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Karanbir Singh Sent: 03 April 2015 01:00 To: centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] [CentOS-announce] Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1503 ) on x86_64
On 02/04/15 21:35, Phelps, Matthew wrote:
See my reply earlier. The description of the centos-devel list says "this is strictly about development."
Matt, come join the contributor base - be a commnuity communication liason ( or, I am sure we can find a title to quantify this ).
stretching this a bit futher : lets see if we can find 10 people who might be considered 'community beacons', who could / would act as commnuity comms and liason to make sure we are driving in the right directions and communicating things in the most impactful manner.
I am willing to lobby the board to then allow this group to spectate and feedback into Board Meetings ( we meet once a month ).
Limiting the influence of the community to spectate and feedback seems less than I would expect. If community involvement in governance is to be improved, it needs to be seen to make a difference. OpenStack has ambassadors (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Community/AmbassadorProgram) and elections to the 1/3 of the board from the community. This is probably too heavy for CentOS but some form of community representation with a genuine voice in governance would seem reasonable for an open source project.
However, with the board rules as defined in http://www.centos.org/about/governance/joining-the-project/, it is difficult for someone who is a user of CentOS as opposed to a developer to meet the merit criteria. The current CentOS board membership would benefit from more diversity and different outlooks to help identify changes which need further community input such as this one.
One data point I want to drop in here is that less than 0.1 % of the CentOS user base has any contact with the project ( wherein I imply, lists + forums + irc + bugs + wiki ), so we might need to spread the net wide to find a reasonable representation.
thoughts ?
The challenge here is to find the appropriate people to help since many will be paid for delivering value to their companies rather than being paid to work on CentOS. Given their limited time, I do not feel that requiring operators to follow a development list is the right solution to encourage more interaction.
Tim
-- Karanbir Singh +44-207-0999389 | http://www.karan.org/ | twitter.com/kbsingh GnuPG Key : http://www.karan.org/publickey.asc _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Tim Bell Tim.Bell@cern.ch wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Karanbir Singh Sent: 03 April 2015 01:00 To: centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] [CentOS-announce] Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1503
) on
x86_64
On 02/04/15 21:35, Phelps, Matthew wrote:
See my reply earlier. The description of the centos-devel list says "this is strictly about development."
Matt, come join the contributor base - be a commnuity communication
liason (
or, I am sure we can find a title to quantify this ).
I can't take on any further time sinks. But see my comments below. I question the need for such a thing.
stretching this a bit futher : lets see if we can find 10 people who might be
considered 'community beacons', who could / would act as commnuity comms and liason to make sure we are driving in the right directions and
communicating
things in the most impactful manner.
I am willing to lobby the board to then allow this group to spectate and feedback into Board Meetings ( we meet once a month ).
It strikes me that RedHat spends money to do this with their customers. So why not just do what RedHat does? Is that not the core philosophy of CentOS? It's a non-commercial repackaging of RHEL. Why go in a different direction in the first place?
I understand things have evolved beyond that simplistic viewpoint, but perhaps CentOS should go back in that direction(?). It certainly would have avoided this kerfuffle.
If external forces are moving CentOS towards becoming an entirely different distro, then break the cord. Make the choice clear. (And tell us why, if possible.)
Limiting the influence of the community to spectate and feedback seems less than I would expect. If community involvement in governance is to be improved, it needs to be seen to make a difference. OpenStack has ambassadors (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Community/AmbassadorProgram) and elections to the 1/3 of the board from the community. This is probably too heavy for CentOS but some form of community representation with a genuine voice in governance would seem reasonable for an open source project.
However, with the board rules as defined in http://www.centos.org/about/governance/joining-the-project/, it is difficult for someone who is a user of CentOS as opposed to a developer to meet the merit criteria. The current CentOS board membership would benefit from more diversity and different outlooks to help identify changes which need further community input such as this one.
One data point I want to drop in here is that less than 0.1 % of the
CentOS user
base has any contact with the project ( wherein I imply, lists + forums
- irc +
bugs + wiki ), so we might need to spread the net wide to find a
reasonable
representation.
thoughts ?
These numbers surprise me. Again, what about the RedHat customer base? The 20,000+ facebook users who "liked" the CentOS page may be another source of different opinions. Perhaps the developers/board should engage them?
The challenge here is to find the appropriate people to help since many will be paid for delivering value to their companies rather than being paid to work on CentOS. Given their limited time, I do not feel that requiring operators to follow a development list is the right solution to encourage more interaction.
Tim
I agree with Tim. CentOS does need to do a much better job communicating with their customers. And, yes, we are customers. Along with that, the "public facing" members of the Community/developers need to be better communicators. Statements like "This is how it's going to be. I suggest you familiarize yourself with it" aren't endearing to the project.
-- Karanbir Singh +44-207-0999389 | http://www.karan.org/ | twitter.com/kbsingh GnuPG Key : http://www.karan.org/publickey.asc _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On 04/03/2015 10:31 AM, Phelps, Matthew wrote:
I agree with Tim. CentOS does need to do a much better job communicating with their customers. And, yes, we are customers.
No, we are not customers in the strict sense, as that implies a purchase or some other consideration is given for a product. Users, yes. Customers, no. Community members? Perhaps. Licensees? Yes, and all of the responsibilities of agreeing to the GPLv2 for the distribution as a whole apply.
Along with that, the "public facing" members of the Community/developers need to be better communicators. Statements like "This is how it's going to be. I suggest you familiarize yourself with it" aren't endearing to the project.
From where I sit, I have seen much improvement in the project's communications as well as in how well the project leads communicate. Do we need reminders of the situation between the releases of 4.10, 5.6, and 6.0? Perhaps there can be more improvement, but I'm also going to be sure to state that the improvements that have already been made are very welcome.
On Fri, April 3, 2015 9:31 am, Phelps, Matthew wrote:
On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Tim Bell Tim.Bell@cern.ch wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Karanbir Singh Sent: 03 April 2015 01:00 To: centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] [CentOS-announce] Release for CentOS Linux 7
(1503 ) on
x86_64
On 02/04/15 21:35, Phelps, Matthew wrote:
See my reply earlier. The description of the centos-devel list says "this is strictly about development."
Matt, come join the contributor base - be a commnuity communication
liason (
or, I am sure we can find a title to quantify this ).
I can't take on any further time sinks. But see my comments below. I question the need for such a thing.
stretching this a bit futher : lets see if we can find 10 people who might be
considered 'community beacons', who could / would act as commnuity
comms
and liason to make sure we are driving in the right directions and
communicating
things in the most impactful manner.
I am willing to lobby the board to then allow this group to spectate
and
feedback into Board Meetings ( we meet once a month ).
It strikes me that RedHat spends money to do this with their customers. So why not just do what RedHat does? Is that not the core philosophy of CentOS? It's a non-commercial repackaging of RHEL. Why go in a different direction in the first place?
I understand things have evolved beyond that simplistic viewpoint, but perhaps CentOS should go back in that direction(?). It certainly would have avoided this kerfuffle.
If external forces are moving CentOS towards becoming an entirely different distro, then break the cord. Make the choice clear. (And tell us why, if possible.)
Limiting the influence of the community to spectate and feedback seems less than I would expect. If community involvement in governance is to be improved, it needs to be seen to make a difference. OpenStack has ambassadors (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Community/AmbassadorProgram) and elections to the 1/3 of the board from the community. This is probably too heavy for CentOS but some form of community representation with a genuine voice in governance would seem reasonable for an open source project.
However, with the board rules as defined in http://www.centos.org/about/governance/joining-the-project/, it is difficult for someone who is a user of CentOS as opposed to a developer to meet the merit criteria. The current CentOS board membership would benefit from more diversity and different outlooks to help identify changes which need further community input such as this one.
One data point I want to drop in here is that less than 0.1 % of the
CentOS user
base has any contact with the project ( wherein I imply, lists +
forums
- irc +
bugs + wiki ), so we might need to spread the net wide to find a
reasonable
representation.
thoughts ?
These numbers surprise me. Again, what about the RedHat customer base? The 20,000+ facebook users who "liked" the CentOS page may be another source of different opinions. Perhaps the developers/board should engage them?
The challenge here is to find the appropriate people to help since many will be paid for delivering value to their companies rather than being paid to work on CentOS. Given their limited time, I do not feel that requiring operators to follow a development list is the right solution to encourage more interaction.
Tim
I agree with Tim. CentOS does need to do a much better job communicating with their customers. And, yes, we are customers. Along with that, the "public facing" members of the Community/developers need to be better communicators. Statements like "This is how it's going to be. I suggest you familiarize yourself with it" aren't endearing to the project.
Fully agree. Let me add just general thing what I came to, which may help some of the users and maybe the developer team in their view of changes they think to implement.
When I start feeling particular distribution does not fill the bill of requirements, I (realizing I will not be able to affect its future route) just start looking for different distribution which is more suitable and will not deflect from being such for some future to come. This happen to my servers which fled to FreeBSD (sorry about mentioning it). My number crunchers and clusters do not have that luxury to be able to flee Linux (there are too many thing they need to run which are available for Linux only). Therefore, the future process of fleeing these (if necessary) will be inside Linux subset of distros, again, when/if it is necessary (CentOS 7 made it solid "when"). So it likely will be Devuan (systemd-free fork of Debian) when (if?) it matures enough - some time down the road.
I wrote this not to annoy anyone, but to give those at the "strategic decision" level the picture of what evolution you can expect from regular sysadmin. In other words, once you have become extremely popular distribution (to the level you even provide paid jobs), if you started making changes to what you are as a distribution, changes of a kind that some commercial company can make more profit as a result, what I described will start happening. Great company, BTW, RedHat is! I use CentOS by keeping in mind that my University has RedHat contract, so they (RH) are getting paid for the great job they are doing. But I use CentOS as it is great distribution for which everything is readily accessible for me (no "pilot" server hassle...), say, in case of emergency if I just need to get packages, and there is no server (which may have downtime) is between me and what I need.
Not meant to be a rant, but meant to give the "strategic decision makers" a view of what on a regular sysadmin level they can expect.
Valeri
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 10:07 AM, Valeri Galtsev galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu wrote:
When I start feeling particular distribution does not fill the bill of requirements, I (realizing I will not be able to affect its future route) just start looking for different distribution which is more suitable and will not deflect from being such for some future to come.
To this end, I wonder if anyone has gone to the trouble to collect the source for RHEL, CentOS, Oracle, and Scientific Linux (etc.) and diff the whole mess looking for practical and philosophical differences beyond what you can see from their mission statements.
-
Lamar Owen -
Les Mikesell -
Phelps, Matthew -
Tim Bell -
Valeri Galtsev