I don't think closed forks are necessarily something to lose too much sleep over. Most code that's written is never used outside of the organisation its written in and GPL doesn't enforce it - contribution of changes back is a self-interest thing that's motivated by laziness with respect to maintaining the fork. Even when there is a commercial justification to maintaining a fork in a product that's sold, the product lifecycle means that eventually the justification will likely be diminished, and then a release will take place - and to me that seems fine, because the enhancement is released, and the investor got a return, and everyone is happy. Its hard to justify major R&D into GPL software - look at the comparative R&D budgets of the Linux vendors compared to Sun.
I'd rather have an environment where commercial investment can be justified and made, and trade that for a period of jealousy while investors make their returns. > boost the BSDs and MacOS Now - just what is the point of the MacOS core now? I can't imagine why Apple ported DTrace to their crufty multi-layered kernel. I would have thought it cleaner all round to pop the userspace onto Solaris - they'd find their stuff an easier sell to longtime UNIX shops if they did, I'm sure, and their existing media and publications userbase wouldn't care at all. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
