> IPS decommissioning? No. You should read Dave Miner's > blog on how to 'roll-your-own' OpenSolaris distro: > > http://blogs.sun.com/dminer/entry/constructing_an_open > solaris_distro > > You also have the legacy distros to review and learn > from: > http://www.genunix.org/dist/ > > So, its like wanting good applesauce but not willing > to peel any apples. We have the kernel as well as > many of the packages available to us. We also have > many toolsets and Live CDs from several distribution > providers.
Warning: This is long. Feel free to ignore it if your time is short. Are you saying the goal from the beginning was to encourage people to split their efforts ? In open source you usually don't care too much about wasted efforts when you've got lots of people working on everything. That doesn't seem to be the case for OpenSolaris so actually concentrating efforts would make more sense. There is an OpenSolaris distribution (Indiana) and people should be encouraged to dedicate their time to make it better. Why can't they ? As others have pointed out, Indiana seems to be the base for Solaris Next and Oracle can't risk 3rd-parties meddling with their commercial project which, in my book, is totally correct. Now, should it really be a copy&paste to Solaris Next ? Where are you encouraging innovation with that ? What happens today is that independent individuals are not actively working on any distribution of considerable size. They are also not contributing back to Indiana because emails about it have gone unanswered for quite some time. People have demonstrated repeatedly they would dedicate time to projects if they felt it would make a difference, get accepted, whatever. Right now they risk getting a "thanks, but no thanks" if their contribution is not aligned to Oracle's roadmap. And what roadmap is that exactly ? No one outside Oracle knows as there has not been any communication regarding Oracle's vision for OpenSolaris. At the same time Oracle is shooting itself in the foot by allowing 3rd-party companies to take the OpenSolaris.org code, create commercial products on top of it (which directly compete its products) and barely contribute as much code as they could given all the paid engineers working for them. Why should they care though ? The project is engineered to encourage that anomaly. Now that's an argument against having open sourced it, isn't it ? It sure is, but open source is not to blame. Poor execution is. Whoever had the "vision" that Linux is so great because it has 10k different distributions was not in his right mind. There was another email saying that changing the OpenSolaris binary distro name to something else would accomplish nothing but to make it clear that it's a commercial product. I would say that, at this point, making things more clear is exactly what's lacking. It would save yet another email complaining that it's not open enough. IMHO, Oracle needs to get their open source act together and remove the barriers which today prevent OpenSolaris from reaching out to more people (both in usage and contributions). If they don't want to do this, which is TOTALLY fine by me, at least stop working against itself and create something like a paid OpenSolaris consortium of some sort where companies will pay to have the right to modify the source in a controlled way (even bound by a multi-million dollar contract if you will). Or close it completely and people will compare Solaris/OpenSolaris to AIX/HP-UX/IRIX/zOS and not Linux/*BSD. I would hate to see it happening since even as a system administrator, access to the code sometimes works better than documentation, but I won't be a hypocrite to pretend that the current situation is working quite right for Oracle either. They have to profit from it somehow but they are only getting frustrated users complaining all the time. It would be better to set the expectations once and for all. Sorry but the couple of phrases (yeah, that much) about OpenSolaris future are not enough. Someone has to officially stand up and try his/her best to answer the questions from concerned users. Unless there are secret plans for an open source project. Please note that I'm not even talking about 2010.x being delayed. This is not an issue for folks like me working in the datacenter. ISVs working on keeping applications integrated to OpenSolaris (hoping it'll be Solaris Next) or even desktop users, usually like to see more action in the form of roadmaps or updates. Are they wrong? I can't say. It's not clear they are the niche Oracle is aiming this whole thing at. Last I checked this was an open source project, so be clear, set the expectations right and drop the bureaucracy barriers. At this point nobody can't stand the "Oracle doesn't say anything until it's done" or "Oracle can't say anything before the fiscal year is over" anymore. This works for Oracle's customers, not for an open source project. All that being said, OpenSolaris still has too many technical advantages over the competition to set people running away too fast. I think that's what has kept many folks around until now. I just hope Oracle doesn't think it's that many advantages that they can play a "like-it-or-leave-it" game. It won't last forever. Before technical folks take offence at what I've said let me once again express my gratitude for everybody working on making OpenSolaris/Solaris what it is. It's a great product and you deserve all the kudos for it. When I talk about governance issues and the project as a whole I'm aiming it at whoever call the shots on these matters. And no, raising these issues to our Oracle sales rep won't help. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
