Re: Vendor liason

Adam Turoff wrote:

> Do we need one such person?  You seem to be doing a good job inside
> Sun, Alan, and Jeff seems to be doing a good job inside HP.  Why not
> flip the relationship around and try to find liasons inside SGI and
> IBM instead of finding someone vendor neutral inside the community
> to deal with everyone?

The reason for suggesting someone who is notionally independent of any
vendor and primarily responsible to the perl community is so that no
accusations of partiality can be made.  I think there needs to be a
person/group who is there to listen to the various plans and schedules
of the vendors and who then feeds that information back to the other
parts of the perl community, and in the reverse direction feeds the perl
plans and schedules back out to the vendors.

I'm very aware of the suspicion that some people in the freeware
community seem to have of vendors (and I've personally been the target
of some hostility in the past), and I think a semi-formal mechanism of
handling the relationship is a good way of avoiding at a stroke the
issues of openness, transparency and even-handedness.

-- 
Alan Burlison
Solaris Kernel Development, Sun Microsystems