Kindergarten@Blastwave

Blastwave was essentially dead yesterday. As i´m not really online at the moment, the first news about this occurance reached me by the twitter feed of Anfalas. Blastwave is one of the important repositories of pre-compiled opensource software in the Solaris community. From one moment to another, the repository was completely missing.

Later on it came apparent, that the repository was deliberatly deleted by Dennis Clarke, the owner of the blastwave.org domain and the respective trademark because of an raging and unresolved dispute between him and other members of the freeware community, who fill the blastwave.org site with life by providing packages. At this moment it looks as a dispute between the already named Dennis Clarke and Phil Brown - one of the leading maintainers - as Anfalas writes in a german article on his blog. Well: At the moment blastwave.org is online again. So the biggest technical issues are resolved for the moment.

I will not write about an own position at this issue, because i´m not involved enough to have a well-informed opinion on this. I can´t take party for Dennis as well as But will comment on a different problem that arises out of this dispute even for the non-involved observer.

When Sun talked about a way to adopt the Linux-style in some parts, i´m sure we don´t have thought about this kindergarten style in sorting out disputes between the stakeholders of a community project. With participation comes responsibility. The more you participate at a community, the more reponsibility is on your shoulders. When i close down c0t0d0s0.org without any warning , nobody would really care ... but blastwave.org is an important tool for the community. You can be in anger about something or somebody but you have to keep the people in mind, who a service and who are the source of the importance of a service.

Shutting down a service without warning, shutting down a service without discussing a contingency plan for the time without your involvement seems to be an highly unprofessional move. People may have their disputes, but by providing a service to a community you are responsible. Not only for the service, but for the way you solve your disputes as well. Of course you could withdraw your support in a community project at any time you want, but you have to give other community members the possibilty to go forward without you, especially when the community has helped to grow your service by a vast amount of effort.

The Solaris freeware community at large can´t afford such a kindergarten behaviour at a central point of it´s infrastructure. Perhaps the non-availability of the service will lead to a solution, that´s independent from a single site or a single person. So this reaction in anger of Dennis may lead to a waning importance of his blastwave.org project at the long term. The implementation of independent CSW-sites in conjunction with an own infrastructure to provide packages based on the pkg-get mechanism may be first signs of this development.