Hi all, this is a really interesting discussion -- I read all posts but I am deliberately replying to David's response. I am from Solaris Revenue Product Engineering (== Solaris sustaining) team and one of my responsibilities is to make sure that we (== Sun) can sustain open source products in SFW, that is products, which Sun supports (see [1]). So, I know about advantages and disadvantages of SFW as well as of the real problems we (Solaris sustaining) have to solve. (Note for Brian -- in general every fix for Solaris XY goes first to Nevada and then it is integrated to Solaris 10, 9, ... and this is true not only for ON but also for SFW.)
What I would like to stress is that regardless of the actual solution to be chosen (merge everything, keep SFW separate) we have to keep in mind that it has to be clear how to sustain critical open source products in the future. When Sun (or anyone else) delivers an OpenSolaris based distribution then it has to be known what end users shall expect in terms of support and how this will be achieved. There are two major categories of Solaris users today: - People who use Solaris in production environment and they need stability. They are often interested only in security fixes and not too much in the latest features. - People who use Solaris on a desktop -- they typically can sacrifice some stability in order to be able to get the latest features. Similar view can be taken from the actual product's point of view. - For example, vim is important for end users but its unlikely that missing vim will cause problems in a production environment. - However, samba is quite opposite type of product -- many people do not need to set up samba server on their laptop but samba is essential for many enterprises (Solaris servers and Window clients) The above simply means that different products have different support requirements and possible changes in SFW shall satisfy them. Regards, Lukas [1] http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/ This message posted from opensolaris.org
