Christopher Kampmeier writes: > I have to believe that there are many functional areas with similar > rallying point interests that don't immediately or ever require spinning > up their own project with a source repo and all. > > How does OpenSolaris support these interests?
I think that's an excellent question. The key issue, it seems to me, is whether an OpenSolaris community should endorse projects that may have functional overlaps and/or conflicts, or whether the community must act as though it were a consolidation or distributor that needs to avoid high-level conflicts. I think that having overlaps at least at this level is goodness. It allows projects -- even those that may be in some competition -- to coordinate on common issues, which is something that's certainly to the benefit of OpenSolaris. That's true even if these competing projects end up delivering through different distributions, or if some just never deliver at all. The alternative seems bleak to me. It would mean that communities would effectively be able to endorse only a single distributor's (indeed a single vendor's) vision of what projects are valuable, and would consign non-compliant projects and simple experiments to an unnecessary purgatory elsewhere on the net. We have and use the idea of "release vehicle" elsewhere to allow projects to deliver in ways that are meaningful to the users, why not allow it here? Thus, I'll reiterate my +1 for this project. I think it's a great experiment, and deserves some real estate on the opensolaris.org web site in order to do its work. That's all we're really discussing here -- not whether this project will ever integrate anywhere, not whether we're giving it Sun's imprimatur -- but just whether this community should allow it to exist as an OpenSolaris Project, and I think it should. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
