Its that time of year again for OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Elections. This is the time of year that we clean up contributor grants within our meritocracy and generally clean house.

The Annual Report was due Feb 4th but is still in the works. Nominations for OGB will open on Feb 15th and close on Mar 1st. If you are seeking a core contributor grant (and the voting rights that come with it) you need to get that approved by Feb 14th, so look sharp.

Voting itself will open on Mar 8th and close on Mar 22nd with results posted the following day. The new OGB will take office on April 1st (no joke… har har).

You may be asking yourself… will this facade of a governance continue now that Oracle is in charge? So far they haven’t taken any steps to intervene or change anything that I’m aware of. Mr. Peter Tribble requested OGB liaison Vincent Murphy to address the matter in January, but if such a response came it happened on the OGB-Private mailing list. (The same mailing list I proposed and voted to have destroyed when I was on the board.)

While I have great respect for many of the people on the board, I maintain that the entity continues to be useless. Attempts on the part of the community to turn the board into a useful platform of leadership have been undermined by persons unnamed time and time again such that for over 2 years its been a complete waste of time. I rejected my nomination to it last year and if nominated this year will do so again. Until the destructive elements within Sun’s ranks are removed and real commitments are made there isn’t any reason to expend the time on a fools errand. I gave a presentation on the topic 2 years ago and stand by it today: OpenSolaris Governance Presntation at Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group (skip to the 1hour mark for my preso)