Alan DuBoff wrote: > On Mon, 31 Dec 2007, James C. McPherson wrote: > >> No. The issues start with Sun getting in the way of OpenSolaris >> having an open, BSD-licensed driver for hardware which is >> incredibly popular. > > We do know that Sun has been working with Vendors to open their drivers, > and while I don't know where LSI stands, others are and have been > receptive to open sourcing device drivers. > > While it appears that Sun is "getting in the way", Sun has been working > with vendors to open their drivers. As it stands we have little, if any > modern SCSI support on OpenSolaris. Sun has been ecouraging their > partners to open their drivers and provide them to OpenSolaris. > > Yet the community (and some inside Sun) claim foul saying that > OpenSolaris should be seperated from Sun's interest. But in this case, > Sun's interest is in the communities interest also.
That is *not* what I am saying, and *not* what I have been saying. > Should Sun just let the community fend for itself on drivers with the > vendors or write their own? In the best world both would take place. What we have with mfi is the situation where LSI's "oh we're really truly going to give you this source real soon now" has taken, more than 12 months (as far as I'm aware). How can *any* organisation think that this is useful to the people who purchase their kit? >> This "getting in the way" appears to stem >> primarily from being told by LSI words to the effect of "We're >> really truly going to sign the appropriate legal agreements >> real soon now so you can have our megasas driver" ... > > Unfortunately legal gets in the way and rears it's ugly head, we can't > change that. Actually, there are ways we can manage that. I suggest that some of those ways have not been investigated, probably because there's been no impetus to do so, really, until David logged his RFE for mfi integration. >> This second issue is one that has always been on my mind >> and which I have given some thought to from time to time. >> I have not, as yet, been able to come up with a mostly >> foolproof way of working around it. Of course, not actually >> having LSI's driver has made it rather difficult to even >> test hypotheses. > > Indiana will need a seperate gate, not only for drivers, but for other > open source software that Sun elects not to accept to Solaris. Why on earth would you suddenly drop in a mention of Indiana here? To my mind, that is entirely irrelevant. Whatever distros are out there will *all* have to deal with the concept and problem of handling changes which move from one driver to another, and how to make that happen in as pain-free a fashion as possible. James C. McPherson -- Senior Kernel Software Engineer, Solaris Sun Microsystems http://blogs.sun.com/jmcp http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog _______________________________________________ driver-discuss mailing list driver-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/driver-discuss
