Ben Rockwood wrote:
>
> I want to continually be reminded that either solution above is far
> better than what we have today. Right now we have NO direct impact on
> Solaris Express, no voice, no rights, and very little input and only
> indirectly at that. We really don't have the ability to dictate how Sun
> proceeds, only to try to steer it by providing input as much as possible.
>
That is actually not true at all.
Non-Sun employees can sit on ARC.
Many groups have open design on public fora. So a lot happens there.
(Think the desktop components, the networking stack, and recently even
some of the suspend/resume and other laptop related work.)
Various external contributions have been made that are now in Solaris
Express as well.
So, while the community doesn't get a "veto", neither is it correct to
say that there is no direct impact.
As long as Sun is spending resources on this thing called OpenSolaris,
you can *bet* that even engineers will often have their best judgment
overridden by managers at Sun who have business concerns, etc
If you want a "veto", then you need to have your own distribution. And
your own development staff. Here's why:
If Sun decides to take its toys and go home, while the community will
have the current code base, you can pretty darn well bet that it will be
as effective a veto as any that Sun has yet utilized. (And that will
remain true until there is a sizable community of developers working on
improving OpenSolaris who are not Sun employees. With a few notable
exceptions, there are very, very few people in the community who are
writing code that falls into the core of what we would identify as
"OpenSolaris", who are not also Sun employees.)
-- Garrett
