Manish Chakravarty wrote:
Does this mean that if some developer comes up with a kernel patch (just an example) or some driver, he can commit it to OpenSolaris?
After they articulate the architectural impact of their changes, and that impact is determined to be acceptable, certainly. After all, we don't want crap dumped into the source base just to prove that anyone and everyone can commit anything they want at any time.
And if the community (not SUN) finds it good, it will be taken in and will be put up in the next OpenSolaris build ?
It is rather difficult to separate "Sun" from "the community". If you mean "Sun = corporate VPs setting strategic directions for OpenSolaris", that has already happened. On the other hand, if you mean "Sun = the various developers paid by Sun to work on OpenSolaris", there is no chance in hell of that happening :-) DTrace without Bryan or Mike? X11 without Alan? Docs without Michelle and Susan and ...? Install/Packaging without Bart, Sarah and crew? Not very likely. On the third hand, if you mean "Sun = the various review processes that stand between the source code and total anarchy(TM), then you may have a good point. These processes have evolved over the last 15 years to meet Sun's needs. Now those needs have shifted, changed and grown. What worked well in an environment where people could meet face to face, have regularly scheduled meetings, etc, no longer fits so well in a massively distributed open source environment. This is not to say that we should abandon those processes, but we should work to reinvent them so they work well for us today.
What about the bundled software that comes with Solaris Express Community/Developer releases ? Is there any way the community can influence that ?
What about the bundled software that comes with Schillix, Nextenta and Belinix? Is there any way the community can influence that? Are these OpenSolaris.org questions, or are they really aimed at the various distros that are built on top of OpenSolaris core technology? I would suspect the answer is not an absolute - it is probably a "yes" if you are talking about "will changes I make to the core ON, X, SFW and JDS components show up in the distros?", and more like a "I don't know, or maybe no" if you wish to influence the addition or removal of other specific components.
What if someone has his/her own OpenSolaris based distro ? Can he/she make modifications to it as he/she pleases ? What if such modificiations break API or ABI compatibility with Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris ?
Certainly you can do so. Nobody will stop you. And, if you do break ABI compatibility with Solaris, that is your choice. Just please don't imply that you are still compatible and/or complain when various things no longer work with your distro. If you choose to diverge, you are also choosing to deal with the consequences. Who knows - maybe you will be wildly successful and Solaris will follow your lead :-)
These are some questions the community must ponder on.
Absolutely. -John _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
