> On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Peter Tribble <peter > dot tribble at gmail dot com> wrote: > > On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Mark Martin > <storycrafter at gmail dot com> wrote: > >> Create a website and forums to allow the community > to reorganize > >> itself without the shadow of a hollow and > unsupported charter. > > > > So the OGB would have to violate its own rules and > act contrary to > > what we were elected for. Again, the OGB would > really have to quit > > the current system and reform in some other guise, > or new people > > could start afresh. > > Before the community did embark on a community > distribution, I think we'd really need to talk things > through with Oracle, and perhaps thrash out an > agreement. Oracle need to decide if they want to > continue releasing the source code, and whether they > want to continue releasing the OpenSolaris > distribution. > > Clearly Oracle are gearing up for something > RealSoonNow[tm] and my personal feeling is that we're > going to be seeing a Solaris Next release candidate > in place of OpenSolaris 2010.xx. It remains to be > seen what Oracle will then do with OpenSolaris. > > What we do need is for Oracle to properly engage with > the OGB. If/When this happens, we need the OGB to > really drive home to Oracle what the community wants. > Essentially the OGB needs to *enter negotiations* > with Oracle, representing the community, to come to > some form of agreement. So right now the community > needs to decide what we want. > > Speaking as a member of the community, my personal > view is that the OGB should ask Oracle to commit to > continuing to provide access to the source code, but > that Oracle should discontinue producing the > OpenSolaris distribution and hand this work over to > the community. OpenSolaris can become Solaris Next > and Oracle can focus on paid Solaris. The community > can build a binary compatible distribution that > tracks Solaris Next, a la what CentOS is to RHEL.
If you feel you need the control, fine. But my guess is that when OpenSolaris(distro) becomes (with the addition of some closed stuff, testing, branding, yada yada) Solaris Next, OpenSolaris(distro) would continue as the development base for Solaris Next + 1. In which case, Oracle might as well keep making as much of that as is open available to the community as a distro. AFAIK, there's supposed to be some "distro builder" kit. It might not be a bad thing to have a community distro that tracks OpenSolaris (assuming it continues) closely, but maybe has a different first-choice repository, in case the community wants some stuff that Oracle doesn't (such that it had to replace rather than just supplement). That might also be nice for times when Oracle isn't updating the repositories, _except_ that care would have to be taken to avoid getting out of sync with where they'd be if/when they started updating again. I say that because I think an OpenSolaris distro serves multiple purposes. Some folks like to be pretty leading edge (or _maybe_ even need it, except that one can usually get by without something one didn't have before anyway). Most probably want something that, as long as they don't mind staying a week or so behind just to be safe, will be reasonably stable. Some may be doing serious work with it, others using it at home. But some will want to stay close to what Oracle's developers are using, both for deep familiarity with what the eventual subsequent Solaris might be like, so they can participate/contribute, and so they can fully benefit from the power of DTrace by running something for which they have matching code (nm /dev/ksyms|grep FUNC may tell you all the kernel subroutines, but you have to know the argument and return value meanings to make any sense of what you're seeing). For that, I think one would want to plan on staying quite close, and leave other uses to simply having a community supplemental testing/reporting forum, where people could track which builds were the most (or least) stable. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
