On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 12:30:19PM -0700, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

> OpenSolaris is intended to be a collaborative project.  In order
> to collaborate with the rest of the world, future progress has to
> be made in public, using public tools, on public work products.
> Any code that is not open source is dead code that needs to be
> replaced, and the way to do that is by creating communities with
> live code that can be worked on in public.  The only code in
> OpenSolaris is open source code.  Determining what parts of that
> ...
> The CAB has been asked to create a governance process in which
> collaboration can thrive.  While there are several ways we could
> approach such a process, none of them involve creating a state
> wherein Solaris business decisions determine what can or cannot
> go into OpenSolaris, since that is not collaboration.

Compatibility constraints are technical, not business decisions.  The
standard GNU approach to compatibility is that everything in the world
is and must be open source, and that therefore source compatibility is
sufficient.  We could argue forever about whether that's a good model,
but there are two reasons it's not in this case the right argument:

1. *This* community has different values from GNU.  Is compatibility
more important to us than openness?  Probably not, though it might be
to some subset of people at Sun.  But they might well be equally
important.  A person who believed that would be willing to work *with*
Sun, not against us, to find solutions that simultaneously satisfy
both constraints.  This is the kind of collaboration to which I
believe you're referring here.

2. ksh isn't something for which source compatibility is sufficient or
even meaningful.  Even if your scripts are all open source, you'd
still have to change any of them relying on changed behaviour.
Sometimes you don't even know which those will be.  In short, such an
incompatible change could result in a lot of work and breakage for
users.  Why make users do more work so we don't have to?  That's not
just bad for business; it's also discourteous, lazy, and wrong.

-- 
Keith M Wesolowski              "Sir, we're surrounded!" 
Solaris Kernel Team             "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" 
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