> You wish to talk to Roland Mainz, Glenn Fowler and > Jennifer Pioch > then. They have opensource replacements for > /usr/bin/sed, > /usr/xpg4/bin/sed, /usr/bin/tail, /usr/xpg4/bin/tail, > /usr/bin/tr and > /usr/xpg4/bin/tr.
is this a joke? Wherever could they find such precious and novel work? maybe, from the GNU project, fifteen years ago? oh, o sorry my mistake they want *XPG4* versions. seriously, WHO CARES? We are talking about this source: http://opensolaris.org/os/about/no_source/ and whatever is so arcane nobody has remembered to list it there. things like the SCSI midlayer, numerous proprietary drivers for common hardware many written after Sun's ``all new work in Solaris will be open source'' promise, and some arcane-sounding hard-to-replace things like ``Kernel lock manager support'' and The C Compiler. However it's worth remembering there are two binary licenses, the one used by OpenSolaris and the SXCE license. The former is redistributable, and the latter isn't. so, AIUI, if Sun decided tomorrow to stop offering SXCE downloads on the website, we would not be allowed under copyright to copy SXCE CD's and give them to our friends. But for OpenSolaris CD's we'd be allowed. so, the OP's ``emergency'' should be focused on binaries that you need to do development, but which are not included on the osol LiveCD, such as Sun Studio 12. It is only non-redistributable binaries that give Sun the wedge to kill the project. Other binaries could be re-implemented at leisure after the project is already dead. The other thing which is rarely mentioned, is access to the full development cycle for releasing CD's. AIUI there is some project to turn a running system into a LiveCD, but I think this isn't the same code Sun uses to create the OpenSolaris LiveCD from the nightly builds. I haven't been following the installer discussion though. That code is probably trivial to replace compared to ``The Kernel Lock Manager'' or The C Compiler, but it could still be disruptive to the point people would lose interest. Also the mailing lists, bug trackers, and revision control repositories. so if Sun were ever to shut down the project, it seems most likely whatever community work there is would move to some alternative distribution that already has a fully-open cycle rather than trying to replicate Sun's build scripts and web apps. The thing I'd worry about most in such a catastrophe, would be forgetting something. Has anyone actually mirrored all the branches in hg? Is it even possible? Or you just expect it to be there? It is the usual lazy webdouche holocaust of unrobust convenient habits, trusting your life to gmail and facebook and whatever-2.0. And what about all these smaller ``gates'' and ``consolidations''? Is Nexenta backing up the source, building it themselves, and rolling it into their release? Or do they just take the .tar.gz full of the prebuilt stable binaries because it is just a small project and not their interest to contribute to that particular section of Solaris right now? If the latter, do the binaries and sources offered really match, because in my experience they almost never do for a backwater project even in the Linux world where people supposedly care about software freedom---there are rampant ``accidental'' license violations that make it impossible to get the ``commun ity'' version of the source to actually build while the ``impatient web2.0 binary douchebag installwizard release'' works fine. Nothing against Sun in particular here, if anything they may be ahead of the curve, but software developers in general seem to have an incorrect assumption that anyone doing ``development'' will want your latest and least stable work while anyone running ``production'' will want binaries---developers don't seem to get it through their skulls that we want sources for what we are _actually running_ so we can fill documentation gaps, inspect the system with a debugger without changing it, or change one small thing and rebuild---that is what software freedom means, and we do not want software freedom first and foremost merely so we can lighten their workload without compensation. so I'd worry about such an accidental thing: not having source for a piece for which source was once released under CDDL but you forgot to make a copy, or having a broken cop y of the source that doesn't build because of well-intentioned but inadvertently sloppy release practices. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
