> Just one doubt though. > Say SUN introduces some package X into the ON core. > Or say into JDS /SFW *after* June 15th 2005. > Do those code changes make it back into OpenSolaris ?
So far, the answer seems to be at least usually. They may of course have things that they can't release (even new things) because they don't own them; they may also not release some things until they're far enough along to be usable. And while AFAIK there have been statements to the effect that they intend to at least look at opening up everything they can, I don't know as I'd expect to be able to hold them to it, so if something came along for which they thought they had better reasons to keep it closed than to open it, I wouldn't expect much there. But at the very least, I wouldn't expect anything they already have opened to be removed, unless it was being replaced with something else or EOL'd. And they have definitely opened or are opening some new and interesting things they didn't have to (like AVS and maybe some of the Honeycomb stuff). > I know SUN will merge changes back (the ones they > like ) back into > Solaris at some point, but is the necessary also true > ? I think it's been pretty good going both ways so far, although of course that's not an absolute guarantee for the future. > Finally , has SUN committed to maintaining ABI > compatibility between > Solaris 10 (and later releases) and > SXCE/SXDE/OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris is the codebase and the community, but it isn't a full distribution; some of the bits are still closed, but I think it's also missing installation tools and such. So I think the best you could say is that it should be possible to use OpenSolaris code as the basis for an ABI compatible distro, although a distro could also break compatibility if they wanted to. IIRC, SXCE is a frequent, and SXDE a less frequent but more tested, snapshot along the way from Solaris 10 to Solaris 10+1, which are in effect Sun's distros. So I would think that what holds for Solaris 10 and Solaris 10+1 mostly holds for them too, although I wouldn't rule it out that while changes from 10 to 10+1 and from 10 to SXCE/SXDE shouldn't break the ABI, something new introduced in SXCE/SXDE just might get pulled back or redone before it reaches Solaris 10+1. I get the feeling you want a guarantee that you'll always get everything possible, and yet will still be able to have as much influence as possible on content and direction. Maybe it's just me, but I think that when someone else is doing and paying for the vast majority of the work, that's a little...greedy. I mean, a reasonable guess might be that the amount of free labor in terms of actual code they get is so far much less than the cost of opening up the code, setting up the web site, changing processes, and so on. The value of the additional testing, bug reports, and other feedback might be a different story of course. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
