Re: [Linuxcoe-devel] Thaughts on LinuxCOE

[ed f. <edf...@ya...>]

Hi Louis, core-team,

I read this twice, Louis.  These are fantastic
observations, and things we often overlook while we're
burried in day-to-day details.  As far as the
open-source project is concerned, I agree it's doing
very well, and has all the qualities you'd expect
(respect/cooperation/collaboration).  The HP side is
more interesting as we've left IT, we're in Services,
and have gone though some significant reorgs.  We've
survived reorgs in the past, but getting management to
one, understand opensource, and two, actually support
it, are hard things to do.  Even if management fails
to understand and support us, they still see the news
in the press about LinuxCOE, and how Ann Livermore
mentions us in her keynotes.  So perhaps they don't
need to understand it, but rather know that other
"important" people do.  This is why we have the
"LinuxCOE shameless self promotion department."  I
know it seems silly to spend time on this
non-engineering-soft-skill stuff, but I do think it
adds value/support/funding to the project within HP.


thanks for your thoughts!!  I owe you a beer or two!

-craig



--- "Bouchard, Louis" <Lou...@hp...> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> This is highly philosophical content.  So if you
> don't feel like wasting
> your time reading through this, I won't be offended.
> 
> In early February I came about the LinuxCOE project,
> following a brief
> encounter with BryanG & LeeM at the OSLO Tech Tour
> 2007.  I'm starting
> to have a rough idea on how things are working,
> evolving, being
> constructed in the LinuxCOE project.
> 
> I don't intend to give lessons, to teach anything to
> anyone. I just want
> to share my newcomer's perspective on a successful
> project which has
> everything that needs to become even bigger. I
> originally thought of
> posting this on my blog, but this list is better
> since opening a
> discussion is what I'm hoping for.
> 
> Driving to work this morning, I was listening to
> Brian Behlendorf's
> TuxTalk
>
(http://opensource.professions.hp.com/tuxtalks/200706/).
> He was
> talking about open source teams, how they worked,
> what made them
> successful, etc. I found in his description many of
> the things I found
> when joining the LinuxCOE group :
> 
> - Collaboration
> - Cooperation
> - Respect
> - friendship team spirit
> 
> All of that I had already sensed when I met with B&L
> in Fort Collins.
> The rest from our weeklies & IRC encounters
> confirmed my beliefs.
> 
> All of these are the strong foundations on which
> LinuxCOE is being
> built.  This is good since LinuxCOE is, in my view,
> the first real
> example of Open Source in Action within HP. It's
> also a very good
> example of "eat your own dog food" for HP.  So I
> guess that this strong
> foundation can affort to question itself on a few
> questions that keeps
> poping up in my mind.
> 
> Can LinuxCOE exist outside of HP ?
> 
> Of course it can. We have the sf.net environment,
> website, public IRC,
> mailing list, etc. Though I sometime think that it
> is still mostly an
> internal HP effort. I might be wrong, but it still 
> is not much of an
> issue, really.
> 
> Can LinuxCOE exist without HP ?
> 
> It would be tough.  My guess is that a lot of what's
> required to keep
> LinuxCOE alive relies on HP hardware. This is fine
> since the project is
> heavily used internally. But if this was to change
> for a reason,
> LinuxCOE might be faced with the need to find its
> own house.
> 
> Can LinuxCOE integrate participants from the outside
> world ?
> 
> Sure it can. But a lot of LinuxCOE's life is within
> HP (i.e. the
> internal #linuxcoe).  This is not a problem right
> now, but it might
> become one when more outside world participants will
> join the team. This
> is why I'm now auto-joining the public #linuxcoe.
> 
> Where is LinuxCOE common knowledge ?
> 
> In many people's head I'm afraid. A lot of
> functional information lies
> in the Admin docs, and a few other files. A lot of
> stuff is in the
> CVS/SVN repo. But discussions, architectural
> details, stuff like that
> might be somewhere I don't know of. You might know
> where I'm heading :
> do we need a wiki or something similar to that ? For
> example, where do I
> document the thinks I'm setting up in order to build
> the packages
> (rpmlint, lsb-rpmchk, custom scripts, process) ,
> 
> Does LinuxCOE needs a name change ?
> 
> I don't think so, Tony. At least, it is not
> something that will change a
> lot in how things are doing now.  But I do think
> that LinuxCOE fits in
> something bigger : dploy.org.
> 
> The main problem with dploy.org is that it will not
> have a life as easy
> as LinuxCOE does withing HP. It might collide with
> products marketed by
> HP, namely RDP & Control Tower.  So my guess is that
> if rdeploy is to
> succeed, it will need to be a separate project that
> make use of
> LinuxCOE. It will also have to go through the OSRB
> as a separate
> project.
> 
> I hope that these few questions can trigger a
> discussion or at least be
> useful in sharing a newcomer's view of the LinuxCOE
> project.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> Caribou
> 
> -- 
> Louis Bouchard, Linux Support Engineer
> EMEA Linux Competency Center,
> Linux Ambassador, HP
> 
> HP Services                       1 Ave du Canada
> HP France                         Z.A. de
> Courtaboeuf
> lou...@hp...             91 947 Les Ulis
> http://www.hp.com/go/linux        France
> http://www.hp.com/fr
> >
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