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Dave McAllister (SGI) on Linux and Chilli
Mintslice writes "Dave McAllister, SGI's Directory of Technical Strategy has been touring Australia recently. The Age is running this story about comments he made at at local LUG (LUV). It runs over SGI's intentions for Linux, what they're doing to help development, what this means for marketing at SGI, and a treasure trove of bits and pieces including Chilli Recipes. Something for everyone. "
Well.... we have mace hot chilli here first post, but I hope the best for sgi
"And what the people but a herd confus'd,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Never trust anyone over 90000.
Any news about SGI's XFS for Linux?
It would be good to get sources (or they already available?)
Interesting take on seeing Linux as being parasitic on the Microsoft-engendered near monopoly of ix86 architectures. It's very easy to survive when you can run on nearly every machine anyone purchases. Still, what will take Linux to the next level won't necessarily be the Intel factor, but the fact that Linux scales to next generation server and user usage niches. I think the future of Linux is more in the watchamacallit digital TV-VCR thing, and in the Cobalt-type machines, rather than on the traditional server and desktop.
How can anyone believe SGI has good intentions for Linux after what they have been doing to customers? To put it most simply they are price gougers. Before this gets called flamebait or whatever let me explain...
SGI forces it's customers to buy *$1200* software to run gcc on Irix. I'm not shitting you about this. You can see people having this problem all over USENET and when asked for the product people are given the cold shoulder by SGI. Now what kind of business would still be running Irix 5.3 or lower? None that I can think of so that basically means that only hobbyists are still using the old Indigos and 4D series machines. $1200 to make gcc work is simply ridiculous. It should work with Irix without any additional packages but yet SGI chooses to GOUGE THE CONSUMER. I have asked them to put the needed files for 5.3 (since they also run a freeware site for 5.3) on thier freeware page, but they just blow me off.
Due to their tendency to price gouge and generally just piss people off I refuse to believe that they have only good intentions for Linux. I hope you understand where I'm coming from on this. Price gouging is wrong.
I need to make something for thanksgiving. I need to eat.
To quote the article: "McAllister estimates about 20 million machines are running Linux ("seats"). He expects this to rise, so that within three years there will be as many Linux PCs as those with Windows. If this is true, what should be worrying Microsoft - which is still wrestling with a US judge's finding that it is a monopoly - is McAllister's prediction that Linux will grow into a fully fledged desktop competitor, with a host of applications." That sounds to me like predicting a Windows-Linux desktop war in the not-to-distant future in a galaxy not-to-far away... I'd be interested to know how many desktop users there are of Linux (any flavour). And how many actually use Linux as their primary desktop machine. Off the topic totally - what experiences have you Slashdotters had with office suites such as ApplixOffice, Star Office, etc?? -Spud. [The Matrix - powered by Linux]
-- "e-idiot: stupidity for the next Millenium."
Zontar The Mindless,
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I wonder what he means when he says the open source community is not innovative. It's certainly true that Linux developed out of Linus imitating (? or learning from history?) UNIX and all that, but surely Linux has come a long way from there? I'm not that well-versed with the kernel myself, so I can't really say with much assurance in what way Linux has "innovated".
But how about ESR's argument that open source is driven by "tickling the developer's itch"? From that standpoint, doesn't open source drive itself to be innovative, eg. when someone says, "hey, such and such a feature would be a neat thing to have!", goes and implement it, and develops a "bazaar" (to use ESR's terminology) and ultimately resulting in a high quality product that surely has innovated? What qualifies as an "innovation" anyway? Surely ESR's fetchmail is an innovative product of open source development? There certainly hasn't been anything quite like it before, although it does take its ideas from several places. After all, every innovation must start from something; something "totally creative" that you dream up without getting any ideas from anywhere else is probably not that great anyway.
I would argue that Open Source does encourage innovation. Yes, a lot of open source software in existence today are written for the sake of having a free alternative to a commercial solution, but that doesn't mean that all open source software is essentially copying existing ideas without innovation. I'd surely like to know what he meant when he said that open source people are not innovative.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Any Aussie Slashdot readers should be aware there's a huge linux Installfest happeneing this Saturday at Melbounre University - why not come along, enjoy the free BBQ, play some Quake3, do some installs, check out the cool hardware, and pick up a copy of your favourite distro?
www.luv.sn.or for details, registration, and volunteering.
See you there!
Ever since I replaced my HD, Linux has been the only thing running on my machine. I've not touched Windows for more than a year now (and have no regrets about it), except on friends' machines, mostly to get them connected to our LAN. :-) However, I don't use ApplixOffice/Star Office... I use LaTeX for any serious word-processing, and a text editor for not-so-serious word-processing. However, I do experience the hassle of not being able to view Word documents people send me, and people not being able to grok LaTeX documents I send them. I suppose Star Office would solve this problem, but it hasn't caused me too much grief yet and I'm quite happy with LaTeX.
Of course, I'm probably not the normal PC user... so I don't know how relevant all of this rant is. :-)
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Mmm, I've heard that one of MicroSoft's founding principles is standards. That's why hardware support in Linux and BSD is 100%.
i remember trying to use sudo to mkfs jaz drives under IRIX 5.3 -- caused a kernel panic/reboot/fsck session every time. gotta be root.
the IRIX 6.5.4 i use now has problems initializing efs partitions that can be backward compatible with the older versions of IRIX. the sizes come out wrong if you don't do everything just right. is bummer.
hope they do better with Linux; my God they have nice hardware.
But not to get you down, have a look over at Linux World where Nick Petreley has a good, if quick review of Corel Linux.
Wade.
Linux==Flaming Sphincter from Hell
BSD==TexMex
AIX==all meat
BEOs==beans
...and Microsoft==Trouser Chili
>The real innovation is with Linux...SGI dont forget it! That's why SGI made that nice new whimpy logo just for you!
"The open-source community is a good imitator but not a good innovator."
Correction, the Linux community is a good imitator.
Open-source (Apache et al) doesn't IMHO fit into that category.
Linux is open-source but open-source is more than just Linux!
The statement that the open-source community is not a good innovator is, like most complex issues, both true and untrue.
On the one hand, only the most blind of observers would suggest that novel products are not emerging from that quarter. The sheer volume of announcements on Freshmeat is just flabbergasting, and scattered like jewels in among the 95% of fairly ordinary stuff are some really excellent software products and many priceless ideas.
But on the other hand, and maybe this is where SGI is coming from, innovation in the Linux kernel is comparatively minimal. I don't think anyone would go so far as to say that it is stifled, but the fact remains that the choice of which ideas are accepted into the official release and which are not is in the hands of a very few people (maybe three or four, or possibly just the one). That must have an effect on innovation, however much we respect the people in question.
As a little example of the above, the DIPC project implemented a gem of an idea (I have absolutely nothing to do with it, by the way): allowing processes that communicate through System V IPC mechanisms on a single host to do so even if they are on different machines, while maintaining 100% compile-time application compatibility because the only difference at the API is a single bit in the IPC headers which you'd flick off or on for single or multiple machine operation. That's innovation, usefulness and elegance rolled into one. But no, Linus didn't want to put it into the standard kernel, and to say that the developers were greatly dispirited is the understatement of the year.
It's worth reflecting that if a kernel facility isn't part of the standard distribution, or worse, if it's available only as a patch, then for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. We musn't get ourselves into a situation where innovation in the Linux kernel suffers as a result of this possibility.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
For those that don't know what it is it was suppose to be the next level to OpenGL, giving higher level scene control and incorparating in audio, input etc. to give one API for it all. It was a joint project between SGI and Microsoft (and maybe a few others) and was suppose to take the best from OpenGL and DirectX, and then add a bit more.
Anyway, I just noticed this message on the SGI site
Seems like it's one of the things SGI has 'thrown away' - hopefully they'll use what they've learnt and put it into something else...
You don't know what your talking about and it shows. IRIX scales vastly better than Linux and as good or better than the other proprietary Unices. If it didn't it wouldn't be routinely running on 16-256 CPU machines. Linux is jus tnow getting a threaded TCP/IP stack for example. Linux lost the Mindcraft benchmarks for a good reason, 2.2.x doesn't scale well.
You must have really botched something if your getting 2 hours uptime, or more likely you just made that number up to add drama to your lame post.
As for Linux blowing SGI away on the desktop, I don't see it and neither did Linux in his Comdex speach where he expressed disappointment with the Linux desktop. Linux has no serious commercial applications in key desktop areas like CAD and Animation. I hope this will be changing soon but right now Linux just isn't flying on the desktop outside of Netscape, Star Office, Gimp and a few other free or open source apps like Blender which just don't stack up against commercial apps.
@de_machina
It says that there is a Recipe for Chili on his Homepage...
of course there was no link to his homepage.
does anyone by chance have a URL for this guys page?
Oh yeah, every geek and his girlfriend will go...
GF : "Do we have to go to that geek fest, what a bore..."
Those poor cucumbers....how could you?
-Spud.
-- "e-idiot: stupidity for the next Millenium."
Aint that BIG computer show on this weekend? Why not meet there too.
non-scalable OS? Solarium, right?
I cna't believe he can say something like "open source programmers are good imitators, not innovators", I mean does this guy have any idea where the web came from? (Could it have come about any other way ? Think if you would have shelled out a couple of thousand for Mosaic or NCSA httpd..)
And then there was that comment about Linux, not being capable of running several applications at the same time. This guy just plainly doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. On my own home system, setup for just personal use, I have already a webserver, database (postgres), MTA's, editors, browsers, and xterm's all running at the same time (just in case anybody here that doesn't do Linux.)..
-fred
Well, in the land of Oz, we tend to spell it
one L CHILI for the actual pepper, and two L CHILLI for the dish with meat & beans & stuff.
I've seen it in many books & recipes like that.
Why? NFI.
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.
I can't see a reason to post this other than to troll.
I must be particularly blessed I guess since I seem to get uptimes of the order of months (Indigo2,Octane etc.).
IRIX scales very well indeed - in fact, this scaleability is core to SGI's business.
As to Linux having 'all but taken over the 3d market' - complete crap ofcourse. Linux can't compete at a professional level yet until we get hardware accelerated openGL.
Oh, and by the way, SGI don't make graphics 'cards'.
SGI have a great deal of experience in areas that Linux lacks and I, for one, am impressed and cheered by their faith.
As for you ... what a mean-spirited post.
*plonk*
It's below the picture at the top ;
http://reality.sgi.com/davemc
although it redirects you to ;
http://www.natures-fx.org/index.html
Nice dancing penguin!
It's spelled "chile." As in Voodoo Chile.
"Chilli" does not appear in my dictionary, either. :)
Zontar The Mindless,
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I would but there is one major problem: Shafted 6. It's on the same day! Hard choice, but seeing as I'm registered for it I will be going to shafted.
---
Just because life sucks, it doesnt mean you have to care.
Please... These marketting people need to get a grip.
Also, bear in mind that McAllister himself said that a culture change was needed. Corporations, like people, can and do change over time. I mean, look at IBM. If you had told me five years ago that Big Blue would be pouring money into Linux and Apache and Java and XML, I would have ask for some of whatever you were smoking. I probably would have said that it was impossible for that bunch of white-shirted-blue-tied-COBOL-writing-batch-jobber s to learn new tricks.
Give SGI some time to change. They might surprise you yet.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
"irix does not scale well at all" Uh sure it doesn't, whats running on that 1024 processor Origin cluster again? Irix. BTW theres a difference between 3d cards for games and 3d for CAD and design work. Gaming cards just go for fill rates and thats all, professional 3d cards can do realtime rendering and calculations. Ever seen the permedia2 chipset?
"open source programmers are good imitators, not innovators" Most of the stuff on freshmeat is a poor copy of a windows program. How many ftp clients look EXACTLY like ws_ftp or cuteftp for windows? All of them. Which came first, photoshop or gimp?
AFAIR DIPC was/is still distributed through a GPL-incompatible (and BSD-incompatible) license, and the author tried to get only the DIPC API module interface into the main kernel, while keeping the module code still non-GPL. No wonder Linus rejected the patch, I think.
Also, I have not seen anything about DIPC on linux-kernel, apart from maybe two announcements - the author should first post to linux-kernel and check out the reaction of kernel hackers. Putting things out into the open helps, you get more eyeballs and you can be sure it's the right patch when it goes to Linus.
Hate to correct you, but you're wrong.. It's both. (In british english, at least)
At least, according to my New Zealand dictionary.. (of which I would name, but the cover's ripped off and it starts at alphanumeric.....).
And dictionary.com, which I'd assume is American English tends to agree. chilli or chili.--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
WTF???? 2 hours uptime??? It take me more than 2 hours just to boot up one of these SGI boxes. And after that, I only have a few minutes to log in and grab a crash dump before the machine bonks again. What's the use of saving crash dumps when one doesn't have enough time to go in and analyze it?
You're right on the dot about scalability. Not much after we got our SGI Origin 2800 with 2048CPU, we wiped out IRIX and loaded RH 2.2 and it rocks. Never have 2048 CPU's being co-ordinated so beautifully. Our "End Of Earth" antimatter bomb calculations took 200hr to simulate(excluding the 2000hr required for rebooting when it crashes) w/IRIX, but with RH 2.2, it took only 13.031 sec. Even when we loaded Linux 0.90 while using a Coleco Adam's tape drive as swap device, we still did the simulation in 16hrs. Our beowulf cluster of 2,000,000 PCs took just 2.124 microseconds to complete.
Maybe SGI should give IRIX to M$ as a gift so that M$'s OS becomes even worse.
When I try to read between the lines of the policies of SGI, IBM, HP and Sun what I'm seeing is a general desire to make Linux successful because they think it will keep Gates off their back. Seems to me that about 3-4 years ago everybody had the beginnings of an NT port for their processors and this must have had them worried. Is Linux some sort of enemy-of-my-enemy to them? Do they really want to see it succeed? Once they've derailed Windows will they turn on Linux? Or, is there some other strategy that they have in mind? If there is something else then I'm afraid I don't understand what it is and I'd love to be enlightenned.
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
I think this is an example of something different. I was using finger and talk ten years ago for instant messaging. It worked excellent (finger was much more useful then than today and talk was simple and convenient on a text terminal) and surely it was open source? But commercial messaging systems has taken over because commercial companies rule the desktop market and probably also because of marketing. How much marketing does an initiative such as Gale get?
There are a few little nits I'd like to pick here.
-josh
Microsoft has been uttering the word in every other sentence, but it usually means buying or stealing someone's ideas or technology, seizing the market by force, and taking credit for it.
There are orders of magnitude more innovative ideas at my company than there are developers to implement them, and most of them would just make our software more complex and unwieldy.
Probably the most difficult part of designing GOOD software is knowing what to leave out. Conservative judgement is called for in a tool that many people depend on--otherwise you end up with Windows! Sure, let's throw a graphics API into the kernel! Let's download COM objects into our browser that can do as they like! Let make every piece and every layer interconnect with every other piece and layer so the whole thing becomes a huge Gordian's knot that even the sword of the U.S. Government can't slice through!
A conservative approach means some worthy features will be left out, but it's a lot easier to add a good feature later on than to take out a bad one. One of the more innovative languages I know is Oberon, a language that can be clearly and unambiguously defined in fifty-odd pages, as compared to the hundreds of pages needed to define C++, which is still ambiguous and subject to the implementor's interpretation. Technologies like CORBA existed long before HTTP, but the web wasn't built on them. HTTP was innovative in its simplicity!
Whatever one's take on the platform, one of the big reasons for Java's popularity is that the language has been simplified considerably from C++ and the developers tried to use only tried and true features. Of course, now I hear they're reconsidering operator overloading--don't get me started...
I submit that the best way to encourage innovation is to resist the urge to fold every new feature into the core, instead adding only those features that are absolutely essential to allow multiple, competing innovations to be created on top of them.
The open source community, especially the Linux community, has been accused of "chasing tail lights." I think that this is not only valid, I think it's not the least bit shameful! After all, in a race, on must catch up before pulling ahead, and in some circumstances it is best to let others go first, especially where dead-ends and rickety bridges are concerned.
The strength of the open source community, as I see it, is that on the whole it seems to distinguish between innovation and feature-itis. Perhaps the most "innovative" thing one can do sometimes is make the damn thing work before adding more features! Now I would call that down-right revolutionary!
Brent Rowland
100,000 lemmings can't all be wrong.
Does anyone have any idea what this business case is going to look like? It's rather strange that you cannot find more on this question in the article.
Are they simply going to make money off the support for "their" parts of the operating system? With hardware prices going down even for the fatter computers, they have to look for alterative sources of revenue. I just wonder what Sgi's perspective is going to look like...
________________________________
If encryption is outlawed, only
________________________________
If encryption is outlawed, only
YIE565$FF DSDNE4!MJK XMY7*fRBVM.
SGI talks about linux investment because they .. they have lost their 3D graphics superiority.
have nowhere else to go: They split-off their
processor (MIPS) unit. There are rumors of selling
off cray (their supercomputing). And with the new
generation of GeForce, Voodoo5 AND the new XFree4.0 architecture with DRI from PrecisionInsight etc
What remains ? Jump on the bandwagon and pretend your doing innovative stuff ? Give me a break! Linux can do perfectly well without SGIs marginal
contributions to kernel and filesystem.
"Troll" should be removed from the moderation system.
Usually when a moderation makes me mad, it's a "troll" where one person has spoken an unpopular opinion and the only way you can know if they are sincere or trolling is by mindreading. I tend to assume they're sincere. Others often assume the opposite. Some of them are moderators. Usually the only people caught in the troll are moderators! (resulting in a large thread of "Moderator on crack!" posts)
This is one particular area where the moderation system does more harm than good, I think.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I've just had a browse of their mailing list archives to see if there is a licensing issue. It turns out that DIPC has been GPL'd since August. (No idea what it was before that.)
Trying to read between the lines in some of their posts, it doesn't seem that licensing was the issue though, because apparently DIPC was getting good support from Alan Cox in the way of header patches but no encouragement from Linus. (Despite being a fan, Alan is said not to have had the time to press the issue further). I get the impression that there was a lot left unsaid.
Each case has its own particulars, but leaving that aside, it's the general case that may be of some concern in the future. Linux is a standard-bearer in the free software community, so we need innovation to be encouraged in the kernel as elsewhere if we're not to be seen as lacking in that department. If the coding is of a good standard and is well integrated, the default answer to inclusion in the development branch needs to be "yes". (Hopefully it is, already -- maybe someone from the kernel list will comment). We can't afford SGI to be right about lack of innovation.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Brent makes a very good point. Innovation is important, but not at the expense of any other good properties. Good additions are those that are not only good in themselves but also good in their integration and interaction with other subsystems around them. The decades-old buzzword of "modular" is as important today as ever, and the even older one of "coupling" still rules the roost. If a new subsystem spreads static tendrils throughout older well-proven code or interacts dynamically with many other parts in complex ways, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
;-)
Talking about relevant terms, perhaps we should find a little more use for one that academia values a lot: elegance. It encompasses all of the above in one word, and certainly C++ would never have passed its harsh judgement.
[I don't want to imply that DIPC wasn't up to scratch in that area. The user-level interface is wonderfully elegant, but I haven't looked at the implementation at all, yet.]
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
DIPC is quite an interesting idea. I've already read a little on it, and plan to read more. But I can easily see why Linus wouldn't want it in the kernel.
We've already got several mechanisms for doing this kind of thing: from RPC, to PVM and MPI, to heavyweights like CORBA. RPC is in the kernel already, I'm not sure about MPI, and PVM and CORBA are completely in user-space.
Linus probably just doesn't want to add yet a distributed programming mechanism that's (currently) specific to Linux.
Digression: What we really need is a Linux kernel patch repository. That would give people a better idea of the ways in which Linux could be extended, and would be a central place that would give better publicity to projects such as DIPC.
Who said piracy was wrong? :)
Hehe. It is a necessary evil ;)
--
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
A while back (like in the 70's) people used to say exactly the same thing about the Japanese, "they can copy inventions but they can't invent things of their own". This may have been true whilst they were playing catch-up, but once they had caught up, they started innovating. I believe that Linux will also follow this pattern - catch up first, then overtake. That's when we'll see move innovation happening in the open-source community.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
I think it predates all other messaging/Internet chat services. Everybody and their aunte always tell me that ICQ is so much better, I just don't see why, its fundamentelly the same as good old IRC with a more glittering interface.
My thanks goes out to you. Enjoy your holliday.
I swear I've never seen it that way before in my life, and it only gives the one-L spelling in Webster's Desk Dictionary of the English Language (1990, dilithium Press, New York) but I guess I'll have to defer to the gentlebeing from NZ.
Still looks fscked up to me, tho... :)
Zontar The Mindless,
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Once Linux has all the 1990+ Unix features, it'll be a great platform for innovations in a lot of area.
I have heard of chili (the food) and chile (the
country). There was a cartoon character named
Chilly Willy...
Please explain.
Things SGI are doing :
from oss.sgi.com/projects/
This list is hardly trivial...
And SGI are being a hell of a lot more linux-friendly than the distinctly ambivalent Sun.
The following projects have either originated within SGI, have SGI employees
coordinating the development and maintaining the master trees, or have SGI
employees as significant core contributors.
SGITM Linux® (for Intel ® based servers)
Version 1.1 - NEW 11/08/99
Version 1.0
Linux® Kernel Work
SGI kGDB (Remote host Linux kernel debugger via GDB)
NUMA (NUMA support in Linux)
Bigmem (Big Memory support for Linux)
Lockmeter (Linux kernel lock-metering)
Post/Wait (Post/Wait Synchronization)
SGI kdb (Linux kernel debugger)
Raw I/O (Enhancements to Linux raw I/O capabilities)
POSIX Asynchronous I/O (KAIO)
LKCD (Linux Kernel Crash Dumps)
Linux/MIPS (Indy etc.)
Linux on the SGI Visual Workstations
Samba for IRIX (Windows® / Unix® Interoperability)
Jessie (Cross-platform IDE)
NFSv3 (NFS Version 3 work for Linux)
XFS (high perf journalling file system)
CRCalc (Constructive Reals Calculator, Java Applet)
OpenVault (mass storage management and framework)
STL (C++ standard template library)
GLX (OpenGL extensions to X)
I went along to the talk when he was in Sydney, here is a
summary I posted and his follow up.
"Digression: What we really need is a Linux kernel patch repository."
:)
why dont you start one then?
I have to return some videotapes...
In a sane computing environment, any terminal provides complete access to any computer. I can and often do have situations in which I'm using a keyboard/monitor combination from computer #1, have got some software CD physically loaded in computer #2's CD drive, and am running the program from that CD that's NFS-mounted on computer #3--all the while with I/O going back to machine #1.
What I'm trying to tell you is that where I happen to be sitting makes absolutely no difference in determining what I'm doing. It's completely location-independent. The idea of actually physical collocation is some throwback to the Stone Age of computers. No matter where I am, everything is transparently accessible. This renders ridiculous the question of what kernel is being run by the computer physically closest to me. I don't have to move my body around to access any file or program. Given a network, all it takes is for these programs and files to exist somewhere on some machine on which I have a valid account.
As I look at the programs currently displaying on this terminal, I see that many of them are actually hosted on computers are running a Linux-based operating system, mainly RedHat with some SuSE. But several others are running running on an OpenBSD box, and one is running under FreeBSD. I currently have only one active program running on Solaris, and not under SunOS. The window manager keeping track of all this for me, tvtwm, happens to be running on OpenBSD. But really, this doesn't matter a bit.
I've found that Prisoners of Bill have a very hard time with this concept. The confusion is inherent in certain types of questions, such as the one I've answered here. Free yourself from the cognitive restrictions that Microsoft has insinuated into your worldview.
The Open Source model lends itself to small changes made by numerous individuals. Even when attempts at group innovation work (see Mozilla, for an example), it takes a long time and generates bad PR. You really need a benign dictator to innovate well. That's why you almost never see a group start something from scratch and succeed. Even ESR recommands an individual or small group create a framework in which to work before opening the project up.