[Linuxcoe-devel] Thaughts on LinuxCOE

[Bouchard, L. <Lou...@hp...>]

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

--=20
Louis Bouchard, Linux Support Engineer
EMEA Linux Competency Center,
Linux Ambassador, HP

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