On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 03:31:12PM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > Those are most likely integrating to ON - they could have closed review to > integrate to the /usr/closed section of the Solaris ON gate, and then when > they are ready to go public, have an open review for their move to the > OpenSolaris gate. Of course, the longer they wait to go open, the more > risk they have of last minute changes being required by ARC, but that's
I think it's much more than that. The longer something languishes in a vendor-specific gate, the more time others have to propose changes that will bear on the architecture of the secret thing. And the farther along the secret project team is in its work, the more work will be required for them to change it to address problems identified in open review. There's unbounded risk there for the project team - they could be required to go back and redesign and rewrite the whole thing from scratch. And it's critically important that project teams understand that from the beginning, and accept it. The cost of acting closed should not just be higher, it should be extremely high, so high that no vendor acting in its shareholders' interests could possibly accept it. > For ON, this is already in place, in /usr/closed. JDS I believe has a > similar > internal-only gate for a handful of trademarked and third party encumbered > bits. > > Sun has also known for a long time they would have to figure out how to > handle > the other side - changes that integrate into OpenSolaris that Sun may not > want > in Solaris - though I don't know of any way that is handled yet. Nor is it really our problem. From our perspective these are all just "vendor consolidations." If a vendor wants to consume something private in an open consolidation, it needs a contract in order to do so safely. Those contracts need to be written so as to make clear what interfaces are under contract without disclosing the vendor's secrets. And OpenSolaris consolidations almost certainly can't consume any vendor-specific interfaces. One interesting exercise, if it hasn't been done already, is to identify existing counterexamples to this rule, and figure out what to do about them. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
