On Thu, 21 Jun 2007, Chris Mahan wrote:
I'm going to top post for once.
I'm going to agree with Shawn this time. I feel Sun is keeping a leash on
OpenSolaris so that people don't get the idea that they cam swoop in and
take over the project.
In this regard, FWIW, as someone who is generally proud to be a Sun
employee, I'd like to echo and amplify what stevel said yesterday:
...
I'm opposed to any action that makes Sun look like a prick
who doesn't care about the community. It reflects poorly on
me, regardless of what hat I'm wearing.
Eric
People say that Sun has every right to do that, and that we should feel
grateful because Sun didn't have to open source the code the way they did.
My reply to that is that Sun wants people like me and other linux fans to
get on board the OpenSolaris bandwagon, so they should at least do the
things that will get us to get on the bandwagons, rather than watching from
the sideline (and maybe clapping once in a while).
But I feel Sun can't fathom the day when Rick, Mike, and Jim (fictional
characters all) reach out, take the code that's under CDDL, and pump out a
polished, iso-ready distro called "The Ugly Step-Child", or TUSC for short,
put it on sourceforge, and have screamingly fast servers in a few places
serve x86 isos at 600KB/s. That day, people will scream and shout about
forking and incompatibility, and all sorts of silly things. But The Ugly
Step-Child might just work really well, and Rick, Mike and Jim might
incorporate a foundation with a local lawyer for a few thousand dollars as
the Ugly Step-Child Foundation and have a Ugly Step-Child Foundation
Contributor Agreement, and take donations via PayPal, and put the source
code in HG and let people hack away at the code in the middle of the night.
Now, what would Sun do then, huh? Well, they could still fiddle with the
license, making version 1.1 more difficult (since Sun is the License's
steward (see http://www.sun.com/cddl/cddl.html section 4.1), so the Ugly
Step-Child would have to, in order to protect itself from future
shenanigans, limit their software to version 1.0 (can they do that?)
But the other trick is that Sun would then not be able to take changes in
The Ugly Step Child and incorporate them into Solaris (No Sun Contributor
Agreement) and the Ugly Step Child would start to diverge more and more...
Now, there's plenty of people out there who would say the fork would die.
That may well be. But what if Rick, Mike and Jim really got their act
together and did it well, and a community of several hundred people,
including dis-illusionned ex-Sun engineers (they exist out there I am sure),
rallied around them, make The Ugly Step-Child carrier-grade and user
friendly at the same time, with spectacular package and patch management,
with good driver support, and with full, completely open source code...
But I'm dreaming. It would not happen. Because Sun is involved. At least in
the license (which a fork could not change, not having a contributor
agreement).
And finally some people say that people only want a good binary and don't
really care about the source code. That may be true for the majority of
users, but these people already use Windows XP. The linux people Sun it
trying to attract in general do care about the availability of the source
code under a Free license. Even more so than stalwart Solaris admins out
there.
So I'm going to echo Shawn: this whole situation stinks of "if you're not
with us your against us"-ism and Sun is "God" and we are mere mortals and
when the Sun Priests speak, worshipers follow. Those who want that are
waiting for OSX Leopard (aptly named I might say).
What to do?
Sun forms a foundation with a board that includes 5 members, only two being
Sun employees, and funds then to the tune of 5-10 million dollars, then
grants them copyright to the Open Solaris codebase, along with the
OpenSolaris trademark. And maybe some servers.
This would allow the foundation to change the license under which Open
Solaris and derivatives might be offered under, and use the OpenSolaris
trademark.
Also, Sun should make changes to their stewardship of the CDDL.
I don't mean to hijack the thread or start a flame war, but these are
essentially deal-breakers for me as far as OpenSolaris is concerned.
On 6/21/07, Shawn Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 21/06/07, Ian Murdock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> compatible doesn't cut it. I'm very surprised this argument
> doesn't resonate better around here. Do we really want that for Solaris?
Your argument is irrelevant. The point is that the use of a trademark
under the control of Sun makes this a Sun project, not a community
project.
It also in turn makes the Indiana project appear to be no more than
the Fedora project is accused of being, a way for RedHat to get "free
labor" and testing.
If you want to avoid another mistake, then make this a community
project, not a Sun one. Otherwise, you will have lost a lot of respect
in the minds of many.
Even if this is successful once you do name it whatever it is that you
have apparently decided to do so by fiat, you will have only proved
that Sun could care less about the efforts of the community that is
already here and has already spent many hours creating distributions
that are great in their own right.
Quite frankly, I absolutely refuse to be involved with a project that
is little more than something run by a dictator and is not a community
project.
This project is turning more and more into something that appears to
be little more than a PR stunt by an employee as a representative of
Sun and I have never been more outraged in the two years that I have
been part of this community.
So far every decision and bit I've seen about this project has been
discussed, designed, and proposed all internally to Sun before anyone
in the community ever saw it. Not only that, every time the community
disagrees with any decision being made, it appears as if it doesn't
matter anyway since apparently Sun has decided to hire someone to
solve all of their problems completely ignoring what the community has
tried to accomplish with their own distributions.
The issue of compatibility is not one that will be solved by a name.
It is a technical problem, not a naming one.
--
"Less is only more where more is no good." --Frank Lloyd Wright
Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/
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Chris Mahan
http://www.christophermahan.com/
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[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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