Josh Hurst wrote:
You could make it a community phenomenon quite like Linux if you would allow people to participate without waiting months to see the submitted patches integrated. It sucks when a five line patch for a very dumb bug is queued and no one cares. It sucks when projects like the ksh93 integration need a year, which is 12 months, 367 days or just a painful long time to integrate. Do you really think this encourages contributors? "Come and wait a year to see your code rejected" is the current official slogan of Opensolaris.org Which kind of contributor treatment is that?
I can fully understand your frustration. In an ideal world all the infrastructure we needed to make community contributions quick and easy would exist outside of Sun's corporate firewall, but it doesn't. And we can't just ditch what we have internally and move it all outside the firewall. For example our bug tracking system is used by virtually all Sun products, and contains confidential information, both relating to Sun and to customers.
Relatively speaking, releasing the code as open source was easy as it's an inanimate blob we could examine, then pick up and move outside the firewall. And as one of the people involved in the Solaris source code Due Diligence process, I can tell you it wasn't actually all that easy!
Moving the development process across the firewall is *way* harder, as it involves a large number of internal systems - such as our support, escalation and patch management systems for example. It also requires that we make significant changes to our internal processes (i.e. we "Open Source" the Sun employees, not just the source code), and that's *hard*.
We've done the Open Source thing, we are now doing the Open Development bit. Those of us on the Sun opensolaris.org team spent the whole of last week discussing and planning what work we needed to do to enable the community to contribute more easily and effectively, so we are only too aware of the holes we have to fill.
I can't actually think of any other company who is even close to trying to do what we are attempting. I think we should be given at least some credit for even attempting what is a fairly monumental task. What we need (and have received) is direction from the community on what things are the most important, plus a large slice of patience as we work our way through the issues.
Thanks, -- Alan Burlison -- _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
