Trust Lars to provide a good graphical representation.
As someone that has been around the community for awhile struggling to figure out how a non-coder can make a contribution, and not nearly as eloquent as Michael Feldtein, I have clearly FELT the absolute lack of a structure for user views to make it into the community. When they do make it into the community, they have been filtered by a vendor. It is true that customers will seldom want to participate in the community, but, if like MIT, they do want to participate, they can be extreemly valuable to the long term sucess of the community.
.LRN is an opportunity for user-side interests to have a channel into the OACS community and provide a future model for dotWRK, etc. Perhaps Al's proposal is not the best one, but the key question for me, looking at Lars' diagram, is "Through what box/ structure do user needs flow?"
In Ben's proposal I do not see a channel. In Al's proposal I do see a channel for user interests.
For all the folks that do not feel comfortable with Al's proposal, I ask "How, precisely, does someone commissioning a significant OACS application participate in the OACS community?"
There is another layer on top of users and that is the BRAND layer. .LRN is an MIT e-learning brand. Any OACS developer can adopt the GPL code and peddle it under their brand--most are too small to realize any benefits from this approach.
In my opinion this is the place that forks happen. I think that personalities prevent the forks, so there may not be any structure that addresses the brand/fork problem. Though Don's point of the community getting up and walking away if they disagree with governance, as they did with aD, suggests there is more than enough incentive to prevent forking.
