On Thursday 20 April 2006 07:09 pm, Keith M Wesolowski wrote: > I disagree. This is arguably the least desirable and most annoying > aspect of the temporary process in place for ON:
I whole heartidly agree with you. It seems desirable for all folks to be able to access and submit freely, and I hope we end up in that type of a model in the future. > Sun's stewardship of this site > imposes unfortunate limitations on the software which can be > distributed from it. Damn, I should have kept reading my inbox before replying to Phil, I agree with this also, this is a problem for us on various fronts and if we need to use genunix.org as a front for this, or sunfreeware, or other servers, I think it's not a bad idea to think about that. genunix.org is after all a joint investment between Sun and the community, and maintained by the community pretty much. Unless my memory is bad, both Sun and Al Hopper had donated hardware for that project. It's a decent server, as I recall, and we should leverage it as it's outside of Sun's "jurisdiction", so to speak. Sun legal can make our head hurt, as most folks know. > This is unrealistic. We're running a business here; Again in agreement, and see no reason that this software would be supported by Sun anymore than any other open source software is. > Frankly, I consider Sun's (at least occasional) lack of interest in > the Companion or its successor in spirit to be a given; fortunately, > OpenSolaris offers us an opportunity to bypass Sun management's > priorities in favour of our own. Hear, hear! > This is somewhat different in that Sun has always explicitly > disclaimed any level of support for this product. I believe this > practice should continue; if there is sufficient demand for support, a > company like TWW could elect to enter the market, and/or Sun could > begin offering support contracts for a fee. Agreed again. > > One thought here, being that it is critical that someone who compiles > > software using those sun-provided freeware libraries, should be > > able to redistribute both their binaries, and the sun ones, on the > > same media, without a legal agreement with sun. > > I don't understand why this is important (after all, the system > libraries are already a part of OpenSolaris) but I don't see anything > that would prevent it. I would just like to point out a minor difference in how Phil appears to be looking at this. I don't see this as being sun-provided, I see this as a community project where both the community or sun can participate. If Sun employees work on this, all the better, they are working on other stuff also and I think are willing to help out in this area also. -- Alan DuBoff - Sun Microsystems Solaris x86 Engineering
