It has been a while since I started to consider whether I should have a blog or not. While I was never really against it, and always thought it would be cool, I never had the feeling that my first post would be sufficiently substantial, interesting, or important to let the general public know.
Yesterday, I brought myself to dispel all doubts.
As most people around me will know, there has been a debate in the context of the Open Grid Forum on a quite cool and currently very popular proposed standard for Cloud Computing (IaaS in particular), called OCCI. I shall spare you with details (which you’d better lookup at the mailinglist), but the whole story boils down to a disagreement between the working group’s secretary, Sam Johnston, and the rest of the group on the IPR policy under which OCCI would be published: while Sam strived for Creative Commons-style licensing, the others wanted to stay with the current, OGF-style, licensing.
After extensive discussion on the mailinglist, it became clear that there is a fundamental disagreement between Sam as the secretary on one side, and the chairs, the Board of Directors, and many other active contributors around OCCI on the other. Moreover, all attempts to settle this via other channels (telcons, private email, you-name-it) deliberately failed. Careful consideration of all assets and drawbacks led to the decision of the group to ask Sam to step down from his position, mainly because his unwilling to compromise on the issue.
The result of this decision was rather unpleasant: Sam decided to tweet out his enragement not only by expressing his disgust with OGF, but also by personally attacking chair and active leader of the group Thijs Metsch, who I am befriend with. My replies on Twitter were not exactly gentleman-like and overshot the mark (resulting in being blocked by Sam), but expressed my anger about the way things went. A followup blog entry and the ongoing Twitter crusade by Sam shed more bitterness, and different people (with diverging opinions) have been commenting on the topic.
On the whole, I have the impression that this whole Sam-not-OCCI-secretary-anymore debate is an ephemeral, and should be treated as such: Meanwhile, OCCI work has been ongoing, and the specification is going to be pushed out within a few days – another fact that indicates an overheated, overrated debate, the effort that was (and still is) put into (including my own) would have been better yielded in more interesting, more important issues such as the HTML5/RDFa rendering.
I sent Sam an email explaining my position (and politely admitting what I just said here), hoping that this will both bury the personal issues that arose over the last week, and close a rather bland and unfruitful episode in the history of OGF efforts.
Although I always thought that the first blog entry one makes should be something cheerful and nice, this rather unpleasant post makes me feel better a bit and allows me to conclude a bumpy week by writing my thoughts down in a publicly accessible way. What remains is a lingering aftertaste and the strange feeling of having done the right thing, but still feeling somewhat uncomfortable.