Re: [9fans] Governance question???

[Anthony Sorace <a@9srv.net>]

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On May 14, 2012, at 7:54 , IainWS wrote:

> However things like who handles legal issues in the project, who is
> the release manager ( if there is going to be another release ), a
> "decision maker" - and so on, are some of the answers I am looking
> for. Is there funding for the project coming from bell-labs? Sorry to
> press on these issues but a small focus of the project concerns
> structure of it.

These aren't unreasonable questions, but they do sort of presume a
structure that doesn't really match what folks around these parts do.
For example: "if there is going to be another release" misses the fact
that Plan 9 is on a sort of continuous update cycle (I believe some
projects call this a "rolling release" schedule). It's not clear we'll ever
see a "Plan 9 5th Edition" out of Bell Labs, but they do produce
continuous work. In our tradition (inherited from Research Unix),
releases correspond mostly to printed manual sets.

If by "Plan 9" you mean the "mainline" release from Bell Labs, Geoff
is the main community-visible decision maker there. I believe there
are a few other folks actively working on things in the Labs who
don't participate here (we miss you, Jim!). It's more of a job than a
BDFL-like position (other people have had the role in the past). He
(as far as I can tell from the outside) is the main arbiter of what goes
into the mainline distribution.

But "Plan 9" often refers to the broader set of directly-derived
systems, like 9atom, 9front, and the two NIXes (at least). Each of
those has their own structure (you might say 9atom has the BDFL
you're looking for, 9front has a cabal, and the NIXes each have
partly-overlaping autonomous collectives). It's a wonderful mess.

Bell Labs employs a few people who spend part of their time
working on Plan 9, and provides the most common centralized
infrastructure. They may have contributed funding to one of the
NIXes, I'm not sure. They haven't funded 9atom or 9front (other
than what those projects inherited in code, obviously).

Who handles legal issues? The answer's probably "nobody". Or
everyone handles their own. That's not an entirely good thing, but
it's certainly worked reasonably so far.

I hope some of that's helpful.
Anthony


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