SPI Workshop/Brainstorming Session at Debconf

[Nick Phillips]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 09:12:33PM -0500, Ean Schuessler wrote:

> I will present some of my ideas in a compact form here. I really need to
> expand them into a proper document. Here goes...
> 
> *** Why SPI is a Dumb Name for the Debian Foundation ***

> Last, but not least, getting rid of the SPI name will let us ditch that
> stupid spi-inc.org domain name and speak with one voice and one name.
> Debian.

OK, you've got a few good points, and a few bad ones, IMHO.

In fact, I think you're probably going at it arse-about-face. Thinking of
the community, it's probably more the case that Debian-the-OS is just one
of the things that we all care about -- it just happens to be the one that
begat SPI.

If you really want to change things, I don't think it's a good idea to give
the impression that any other SPI-hosted projects are merely afterthoughts,
or in some way subservient to Debian-the-OS. This would probably require that
the OS distribution be clearly run by SPI -- in effect moving the top
management from Debian to SPI. This however would increase SPI's role possibly
too much, and I suspect be rather US-centrically-unpalatable to a lot of
developers (SPI being a US entity and so on).

The only way out of this that I can see is to introduce another layer of
abstraction -- bring a new (but not a "legal") entity into existence, to
which all these other projects could be affiliated. SPI would then still be
suitably distanced that were things to go pear-shaped, the entire organisation
would not go with it.

I'm not sure that this would be worth the effort, but it might.

Thoughts? (feel free to ask me to explain better what the hell I'm on about)



Cheers,


Nick
-- 
Nick Phillips -- nwp at lemon-computing.com
Fine day to work off excess energy.  Steal something heavy.