Re: [Tech-board-discuss] Re: Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Elections

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 05:14:26PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> It's really just a represent the community type of role.  The LF uses
> the TAB to get a sense of the community for various things they and
> their members are thinking.  Conversely, the TAB was initially formed to
> get a set of specific objectives out of the then OSDL (Doc Fellowship,
> Travel Fund, NDA programme and HW lending library plus a few other
> things).  The TAB takes proposals from the community for things it needs
> that require an organisation to sort out (a good example of this is the
> currently being acted on PCI sig membership, which will give us access
> to the PCI specs plus a vendor ID that the virtualisation people asked
> for to help with virtual device recognition).

James description is a fair description, but I think the one thing
that I'd want to clarify is that the members of the TAB have been very
careful about in the past two years is that we don't speak for the
community.  This was especially true the first year before the TAB was
elected; but even after we held an election at last year's KS, I think
it's fair to say that while we try to advise the OSDL and now the LF
with what the community would like, the only person that we can really
represent is ourselves.   

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:44:00 +0100, Matthew Garrett whote:
>The reasons for this may be obvious with more understanding of how the
>TAB came into existence, but given that the Linux Foundation isn't
>limited to kernel development (see the desktop architects stuff, for
>instance) it seems a bit odd for it to have a technical board that's
>determined at a kernel-only event.

Yes, the LF is about more than just the kernel, and Jim Zemlin does
get input from people beyond the kernel developers on the TAB.  So
right now the TAB really is the "Kernel TAB".   

The history behind that is that original a group of kernel developers
decided to that the OSDL wasn't doing anything useful for the issues
they wanted to deal with, and so there was a proposal to start a new
organization, called the Kernel Foundation, that would do those
things.  But before we did this, a few of us recommend that we one
last attempt to work with the OSDL.  As it turns out, the OSDL
management was under a directive to try to be more relevant, and so
there was an agreement to work with the people who were planning on
creating the Kernel Foundation, and this became the TAB.   

Hope this helps,

						- Ted