[WBEL-devel] Open Letter to John Morris, Beau WBEL members, e t al.

[Hedemark, Magnus]

donavan nelson [mailto:donavan@whiteboxlinux.net] said:

> Your lack of communication regarding whiteboxlinux.net and 
> certain aspects of
> WBEL have become disturbing to myself and a number of members 
> of the WBEL
> community.  

I will echo that I've grown concerned about the appearance of waning
interest, John.  IMHO this is most clearly exhibited by lack of
communication, and also to a great extent by lack of collaboration with
willing volunteers.

> In addition, myself and others in the community have some 
> additional issues. 
> These include:
> 
> 1) Numerous offers from the community offering various 
> things.  To the best of
> my knowledge, none of these have been accept, and in many 
> cases not even
> acknowledged.

My offers were initially not acknowleged but after an extended period of
time passed, I did get a response back.  The response I got back didn't
really tell me how I could help, but rather seemed to be brushing me off as:
1) John has the -final release well in hand with a target release date in
the very near future (I don't think the date was announced so I'm keeping
quiet on the details).
2) My offer to help was deferred until "probably around the end of '04".

Mostly my offer was WRT building packages, not necessarily for the base
distro but also for the 3rd party contributions.  I've got a rather nice
build farm on the way, some of it already in place, and mostly idle.  My
employer is willing to donate a portion of my time to this project.  It
would be a shame to squander those resources.

> 2) Your lack of response to my private emails, particularly 
> regarding wbl.net.

Communication seems to be at the heart of the troubles here.

> 3) Your lack of communication regarding the future of WBEL.  
> Are you going to
> do WBEL update 1 when RH releases the first update for RHEL 
> 3?  What are your
> plans when RH releases RHEL 3.x (or RHEL 4)?  We aren't 
> certain if WBEL 3 is
> the product and updates for the next few years is it.

I'm personally hoping to take a little bit of creative liberty and spin up
new quarterly install ISO's with the updated RPM's already applied.  There
was a little bit of talk about this on the list but IIRC no concensus on
where that was going.

> 4) Who's project is this?  Is this John Morris' WBEL or the 
> communities that you
> created?  

This is my greatest concern of all.

> Right now if you fell ill, got hit by a bus, or 
> just got mad and
> quit WBEL, I don't think the community would survive.  I'd 
> like to see some
> kind of action that promotes the dissemination of WBEL core 
> knowledge.  Sure,
> many of us could reinvent the wheel, but we don't want to.  

In all fairness, John has taken at least some effort to do this on the HOWTO
section of wbl.org.  I don't think it is complete or up-to-date but it's
probably a matter of too much of the load being on John's shoulders.

> Several people have
> expressed concern to me that one person is maintaining WBEL 
> and that their
> companies, thought not scared of using an open source 
> distribution, have
> serious concern
> about adopting a distribution with a community incapable of 
> maintaining and
> continuing the
> distribution.

I'm no anonymous coward.  :)  I'm one of those concerned people.

> I don't want to reinvent the wheel and don't plan to.  I want WBEL.

Ditto.  The technical pieces are almost all there.  What we really need
*badly* right now is to make use of the community resources, and work out
the leadership issues.  IMO progress on this needs to start quickly.

Like I said, I'm doing this primarily for use within my company.  But I'm
stoked about this project on a personal level, too.  Enough that it has
maybe put some strain on the relationships I have with people that have
@redhat.com email addresses.

I have been asked by my superiors what kind of community is maintaining this
project, and have answered frankly that it has all appearances right now of
being a one man show.  This is understandably causing some concern.  Heck,
*I* am concerned.  I don't think anyone is suggesting to do anything drastic
here, but John if you aren't interested in the whole community leadership
thing and this isn't something you signed up for, please let us know so we
can try to come up with some sort of plan for community leadership here.

We all appreciate the technical work you've poured into this project.  It is
a really cool accomplishment to be able to say you got this far on your own.
But the rest of the world has taken notice, and a number of us want to be
able to assure long term stability of this project.  I don't think that one
man can give those assurances, no matter how well meaning he might be.  So,
please, let us help.  Spread the load out.  Let's make sure when all the /.
kiddies come we're ready for it.  Let's make sure that 3 years from now when
the rest of us are still running WBEL, we can be confident that errata will
come out in a timely fashion and third party packages continue to be
abundantly available for those who opt to run them.  Let's do what we need
to to assure compatibility with popular architectures.

--Magnus