On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 06:17:31PM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > or more specifically, what projects/communities should be joining > the OpenSolaris community? Is OpenSolaris the right place for > any open source project coming from a Sun product that doesn't fit > into java.net or another existing community?
Maybe. Certainly if the product is targetted primarily at non-OpenSolaris platforms or doesn't (and isn't expected to) offer its full feature set on OpenSolaris platforms, it should not be included. Otherwise, I think it's fine to allow project teams who have received approval from a Community Group to form an OpenSolaris project to perform a set of enhancements to some piece of technology that also happens to be usable on other platforms. However, I would prefer to see those project teams focused primarily or exclusively on the work they are doing to enhance the technology for OpenSolaris. If those project teams deliver changes that are also useful on other platforms, that's fine and good, but I would take a very hard line against project teams using opensolaris.org infrastructure to do work that is not leverageable on OpenSolaris platforms, and an absolutist stance against project teams using opensolaris.org as an advertising venue for products (or services) they are trying to sell on or for other platforms. If Sun wants to make hay about how Studio, for example, can also be used on Red Hat GNU/Linux, fine. They can use sun.com for that. If, again hypothetically, the Studio team wanted to form an OpenSolaris project to add support for Niagara2 to the SPARC backend, I would expect their communication via opensolaris.org to reflect efforts for OpenSolaris only, even if the code they write and manage happens to also work on other operating systems. Another hypothetical project to improve support for new interfaces in GNU libc for Linux would not be appropriate for opensolaris.org even if the same people and codebase were to be involved. > We've already seen in the Storage & Cluster recent additions that > were not traditionally part of the Solaris OS, but extra-charge > products layered on top, and for most of the things they've released, > they may make sense as part of OpenSolaris. Yes. > However I've had some informal talks recently with people from two > other projects in Sun who are looking at how to open source (and I'm > sorry, but I can't name them publicly at this time) - they're also > both traditionally unbundled products that run on top of either > Solaris or Linux - should they come to OpenSolaris.org to request a > project or a community, what should we tell them? Are we the place > to host projects that deliver primarily on Solaris, but also ship > versions for other platforms? (I suppose DTrace & ZFS already fall > into the that category, due to the MacOS X & BSD ports.) I'm not convinced that Projects and Community Groups are the same in this regard, though. A Community Group formed around some set of technology may be actively interested in seeing that technology ported to other operating systems. That's fine. But those porting efforts are not themselves OpenSolaris projects (they are FreeBSD projects, MacOS projects, GNU/Linux projects, and so on), and you don't see them on opensolaris.org. The CG is a base of expertise that can serve as a resource for other communities, but the projects it sponsors here are for OpenSolaris. I think that's the correct model. If someone from Sun were to approach us with a request for a new Community Group around one of its products, we would evaluate it in accordance with the Constitution. Personally, I take a very dim view of Community Groups forming from whole cloth around a specific product that is or was until very recently closed (as evidence, you see how long it has taken for OpenSolaris itself to become even vaguely independent and viable). I'd prefer to see either a general technology Community Group (such as HA Clusters) or a request for a more specific Community Group coming from someone other than the Sun product team. If the only people showing any genuine interest in the technology are the people paid by Sun (or any other single company) to promote it, I do not think it can justly be called a Community Group. It's a product team, no more and no less. Simply opening the source is not by itself sufficient to justify a CG. > What if they don't support running on Nevada at all, but only on > Solaris 10 or older releases? Should a project seeking support > from OpenSolaris.org be required to run on at least one OpenSolaris > distro? (be it Solaris Express, Nexenta, Belenix, Indiana or > another one?) Again, I think Projects and CGs are different here. A CG could form around a set of technology that doesn't YET work on any current OpenSolaris distribution, so long as it expects to sponsor Project(s) to correct that. Projects, however, that aren't fully leverageable on current and future OpenSolaris distributions don't belong here. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, the relationship between the OpenSolaris Community and S10 is the same as with FreeBSD or any other operating system. We might be friendly, we might like and use and support the product as individuals, but it's not and will never be a proper part of our community. The interests of the user and developer communities that have grown up around those other products, while they may (see DTrace porting) at times coincide with ours, are not the interests we are here to advance. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
