Project proposals

Ray Gans Ray.Gans at Sun.COM
Fri Jun 1 21:52:46 UTC 2007


Sorry about the late reply. I think we're in agreement Oleg. Perhaps  
the word "sponsorship" is the issue. I understand "group sponsorship"  
to mean that we, as members of Group XXX believe this project has (or  
could have) value and we expect -some- people who participate in our  
group's discussions and projects to have interest in this proposed  
project.

Sponsorship does not mean all group participants (or even a  
significant number of them) will participate in the project. If a non- 
member wishes to start a project he/she must ask a group member to  
propose it. In my opinion, that group member needs only think the  
project is a good idea, but does not have to commit to participate in  
the project at all (although that would be nice). Certainly those who  
vote to approve sponsorship would not be expected to join the project.

To be clear, code developed under a project will not necessarily get  
released as part of Sun's or anyone else's binary distributions --  
but it will be available to OpenJDK participants.

So I still think it should be a fairly low bar to sponsor a project.  
Group voting is good because it demonstrates some support for the  
project and will help to screen out projects that belong somewhere  
else or have little chance of getting any attention (e.g., Proposal:  
hey, let's start a project to do x-y-z and see if people want to work  
on it.... but then no one speaks up in pre-sponsorship discussions  
that shows any willingness to do so).

-Ray


On May 25, 2007, at 1:38 AM, Oleg Sukhodolsky wrote:

> Ray Gans wrote:
>> In my opinion, there should generally be a fairly low bar to jump  
>> over to get a project approved -- it should be relevant to OpenJDK  
>> of course (i.e., text editors, games, etc. belong somewhere else),  
>> but research is usually a good thing, even if the direction isn't  
>> necessarily the focus of the majority. Groups should sponsor  
>> projects that their memberships want associated with the group --  
>> not because they think a project is worthy of being added to the  
>> main source distribution, but because the project is relevant to  
>> that group's focus area, or that it someday might be. I would  
>> expect that discussions about such projects could naturally occur  
>> on the group mailing lists and be of interest to some of the  
>> group's participants.
>
> Well, I agree that it should be easy to get approval for starting a  
> project.  But I'd not expect any sponsorship with such approval.   
> If the project is not interesting for me, why I need to promise a  
> sponsorship.  I'd prefer to say: "Well, I'm ok with such project,  
> but I will not help with it".  IMHO, it will be better than say "we  
> sponsor your project" and does nothing for it after that.
>
> Thanks, Oleg.
>
> P.S. of course it depends on the definition of "sponsorship" term.   
> But I'd expect that this is a commitment to help with the project.
>
>> Groups of course have the ability to define the height of the  
>> acceptance bar because their members get to vote. If that bar is  
>> set too high, however, projects will be created somewhere else and  
>> not in OpenJDK -- which sometimes is appropriate -- but shouldn't  
>> occur so often that people feel unwelcome to participate.  
>> Hopefully, group members won't often propose projects that are  
>> really terrible ideas or inappropriate for a group. And while I  
>> certainly don't think we want to create a community of half-baked  
>> abandoned projects, I do believe we want to enable people who are  
>> excited about working together to solve problems or try out new  
>> directions. Disk space is cheap, ideas are not.
>> -Ray




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