> At Sun, we _must_ use Solaris10 as the Baseline for discussions about future changes simply because we plan on building Solaris11 on the OpenSolaris foundation. Our customers will upgrade from Solaris10, and will expect their applications to continue working.
One of the great assets of OpenSolaris is that Sun people are involved to drive development forward. However, Sun itself has another interest than OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris wants to move forward at a faster pace than Solaris, possibly implementing functionality which simply breaks the precious binary compatibility (and it will..just think about reimplementing the "closed" parts. I don't see that happening without breaking it that compatibility, either by accident or by design). That's a conflict of interest. In effect you get two different strains of Solaris. The one which Sun maintains, and the one which is ran by "the community". Question is; how will that relationship pan out when development of Solaris really takes Sun's priority, effectively reprioritizing a large part of the OpenSolaris community's tasks and activities (those of the Sun employees). As time progresses OpenSolaris will run ahead of the music, and introduce incomaptibilites with Solaris. That's inevitable. It's called "progress". Not everyone will agree with it (mostly Sun, they made a promise), sure, but for OpenSolaris to remain interesting for both its users and developers it must give room to implement features its community wants. Whether that breaks binary compatibility or not. What I see sofar is that a lot of people are trying to hold back OpenSolaris progress with the excuse of Sun making a promise of being "binary compatible" with everything Sun (and other vendors) has made in the last two decades. I don't see that promise being relevant to OpenSolaris since Sun will develop its own version of Solaris anyway. Sun can keep its promise, and OpenSolaris can move forward on its own. The only worry would be the large contigent of Sun Solaris people in the OpenSolaris community who push their own (and probably Sun's) interests (and the risk of losing that group when commercial priorities shift). Does anyone else think OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are two entirely different products? This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
