Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758077AbXHWLFk (ORCPT ); Thu, 23 Aug 2007 07:05:40 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753032AbXHWLFc (ORCPT ); Thu, 23 Aug 2007 07:05:32 -0400 Received: from thunk.org ([69.25.196.29]:59379 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752168AbXHWLFc (ORCPT ); Thu, 23 Aug 2007 07:05:32 -0400 Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 07:05:21 -0400 From: Theodore Tso To: James Bottomley Cc: James Morris , Dave Jones , Tech Board Discuss , linux-kernel Subject: Re: [Tech-board-discuss] Re: Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Elections Message-ID: <20070823110521.GI7267@thunk.org> Mail-Followup-To: Theodore Tso , James Bottomley , James Morris , Dave Jones , Tech Board Discuss , linux-kernel References: <1187796179.3410.32.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20070822212202.GE17546@redhat.com> <1187819038.3410.114.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20070822215816.GG17546@redhat.com> <1187820866.3410.129.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20070823021204.GF7267@thunk.org> <1187840997.3410.160.camel@localhost.localdomain> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1187840997.3410.160.camel@localhost.localdomain> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11) X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: tytso@thunk.org X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on thunker.thunk.org); SAEximRunCond expanded to false Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 4839 Lines: 86 On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 10:49:57PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote: > Then you're misconstruing the interactions. A representational role > would imply the ability to speak for the community and make promises on > its behalf. That, as Ted has already said, can't happen. Instead, the > value to the LF is that the TAB contains people experienced in community > interactions who can act as a sounding board for what may (or may not) > be well received. One thing that may be helpful for people to understand is that serving on the TAB is more a matter of service than anything else. There are relatively few benefits of actually being on the TAB. Sure, you may be more likely to get a free trip to Japan to talk about what's going on in kernel development and to help some of the Japanese developers being employed by the Japanese member comapnies become more effective contributors to Linux and the LKML. But, the sort of people that serve on the TAB generally travel too much already, and there has already been talk about trying to get more people outside of the TAB who are interested in serving in this role to have a chance to go to the LF Japan Linux Symposium. And sure, the TAB members have a bit more direct ability to make suggestions about how various LF programs that directly benefit the Linux community will be managed --- but the flip side of that is there are monthly concalls and documents to review, and for the chair of the TAB (currently James), the responsibility to sit on day-long, face-to-face OSDL (and now Linux Foundation) board meetings. This last is important, since many of the other members of the board are from companies that are contributing large sums of money to the LF, which means they are generally VP's and General Managers. Those folks are generally not technical at all, and are so far removed from the kernel community that they have no idea how to help the kernel community or even if certain proposals or initiative that they might try out would be well received. OSDL, to its credit (and those of you who know me know that I was often very critical of the OSDL, in part because its leadership and management was so badly disconnected from community concerns), FINALLY realized this was a problem in recent years, and so the TAB was the first attempt to try to solve this problem. An SPI-like or Debian-like approach with pure democracy might look good on paper, but when you have companies donating hundreds of thousands of dollars and up to the organization, having a board which is elected by mobs of GPLv3 groupies would understandably scare them. So we need some way of selecting the kernel developers who are willing to invest the time to help the LF do the right thing with the resources that they have been given. One way of doing this would be to have someone from the LF just pick the obvious candidates; the problem with that is that it would be rightly viewed as cronyism. Another way would be to have a membership committee that selected people who are considered true members of the kernel development community, and then let them vote. But that's a rather heavyweight solution, and if could result in all sorts of hard feelings about who is and isn't allowed to vote. Having the election at the KS was basically a lightweight way of doing this, although I would have to admit that the pool of electors is a much smaller than my liking. If the TAB was able to make promises on behalf of the community, or enter into deals that bound the community[1], or if it controlled a significant monetary budget, then we would probably need a much more heavyweight and rigorous election process. But, as other people have said, patches are welcome. Feel free to suggest other ways in which this could be done, keeping in mind our design constraints. - Ted [1] Which at one point the FSF was hoping they could do during the GPLv3 discussions. We very quickly set them straight that while the TAB could talk about concerns that we as individuals had and talk about concerns that had been expressed on the LKML, there was no way that the TAB could negotiate any kind of quid pro quo on behalf of the community; and thus we could not represent the kernel community in that sense of the word. The only way in which the TAB is "representational" is in the sense of the word "representative sample"; the LF leadership team can't talk to every single kernel developer, so it needs to find a what is hopefully a representative sample of kernel developers, who are also willing to put in the time and effort to help the LF succeed. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/