> Okay, you know what
>
> Forget it
>
> Fuck sun labs, they're a hostile force and shall be treated as such, anyone
> else want to just fork this project and forget the empty promises of sun
> labs ?
I don't know where to begin.
Firstly let me say that this project started outside of Sun and it was
hosted on a site at Blastwave and at Blastware. Here is what happened, as
I recall it and as briefly as possible :
(1) we flailed in the dark and then Genesi people jumped in and provided
the much loved ( and sadly missed ) Genesi ODW workstations to people.
(2) the Genesi people brought in some good people ( Sven and Matt etc )
and even tossed some shekels into the blastwave world in return for
advertising space. We all started working together and this was
headed up by myself and Cyril Plisko.
(3) we flailed some more
(4) Tom Riddle at Sun Labs jumped in and expressed a desire to get a
port alive again. Also, Tom had some great guys with him that
got RIF'ed or .. worse. We don't know. Guy Shaw? uzi? Who knows.
(5) Martin Bochnig jumped in and expressed a desire to make things work.
(6) Jonathan Schwartz showed some interest and gave a green light to
getting Sun Labs the $$$ and people to make it work. I am guessing
of course because so much happens behind the iron curtain that we
will never know.
(7) I created/hosted polaris.blastwave.org and created a logo and we
all seemed happy to work together. Things felt good.
tick tock tick tock
(8) I did my little port of GRUB2 ( not legacy GRUB ) and Tom Riddle
worked like a madman to get things done. So much of the kernel
bits and the memory manager and other obscure deep magic requires
expensive talent. Little is documented. Little communications are
ever heard again.
A year ago I wrote this :
http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0055/index.html
Updated at Tue May 30 23:58:18 CDT 2006
(9) Time passed on and nothing is ever heard from behind the great
closed gates of Sun Labs. We never hear from Tom Riddle and this
is a character trait he has but he is NOT the bad guy here. He
works his ass off and I have spoken with him on the phone a number
of times.
Sun Lawyers are totally the issue here and if there is to be anything to
ever be released from inside Sun Labs then it must pass through Sun legal.
Stagnation and rot have set in.
and bitterness.
Not much exists at all anymore outside of Sun and at this point it will take
involvement by IBM people to get a port happening on future looking POWER
gear. I don't know what else to say really.
As far as "open" projects go this is a dead project at OpenSolaris.org and
it never should have been allowed to wander back inside the closed doors.
Therefore, as a leader in this project :
I call for a vote of the members of this project to terminate
this project at OpenSolaris.org. Please indicate a YES or NO
below :
YES [ ] - kill this project at OpenSolaris.org
NO [ ] - no .. not yet. Let's work this out.
Regardless of your vote above, do you have an interest in the
creation/resurrection of the power/powerpc port of OpenSolaris
which was formally named Polaris ?
YES [ ] - let us work together
NO [ ] - no means no. Kill this forever.
If you feel YES, we can and should work on a port of OpenSolaris
to the PowerPC and POWER architectures then do you feel we should
once again remove this project outside of the Sun Microsystems
firewalls and get it back out into the community :
YES [ ] - re-open what we had before for example
NO [ ] - no ... let's talk about some other way.
Not a perfect set of questions but we need to at least discuss a few
things.
Dennis Clarke
Director and Founder
Blastwave.org
