On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 8:03 PM, Brian Gupta <brian.gupta at gmail.com> wrote: > 2009/3/31 Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at sun.com>: >> C. Bergstr?m wrote: >>> Alan Coopersmith wrote: >>>> C. Bergstr?m wrote: >>>>> The real goal here is to build a fully open source distro based on >>>>> OpenSolaris technology. > I would say it is safe to say, that all software produced by the > "OpenSolaris community" is still open source. However, "OpenSolaris > the distro" is not produced by "the OpenSolaris Community" it is > produced by Sun. It is a commercial Sun product that Sun sells support > for. It is produced almost entirely by Sun employees, and/or by other > people that are paid by Sun. (Not the community distro some of us > envisioned two years ago).
Unfortunately this point is indeed true, as even a well-known Sun employee admitted in a recent list message. But I don't want to put him at risk, so I won't reference her/him directly ... >> Ignore the vast majority of OpenSolaris distro users all you want and >> declare their wants/needs irrelevant to you, but you can't just claim >> that software produced for them is not part of what at least some part >> of the OpenSolaris community is doing. > > I suspect that many people in the community would not be part of the > community if it wasn't for the early declaration that this is an open > source project. It would be enlightening to have a special election, > just asking the simple question, "Should OpenSolaris be fully open > sourced?" Not necessarily, there existed a Solaris community long before 20050614. Those hardcore Solaris enthusiasts will always stay faithful. And so many others (from other established open src projects) did not move over to OpenSolaris, anyway. I cannot know if this would have been different under GPL_versionN (and under the hypothetical - nonexisting - possibility, to open-up EVERYTHING right at the beginning, which doesn't seem to be possible due to all the laws and licenses Sun.com has to respect). All this would only have functioned, IF, and only if, Sun would (and could) have opened-up Solaris at least ten years earlier. We saw the same with the BSD's. Because in such a scenario LinUX could never have gained momentum, because for what writing an open UNIX-clone, in case UNIX would have been open already, at that time (1991)? But in 2005 we could not expect every LinUX- or BSD* developer to suddenly neglect their beloved pets-projects over night. Many of "them" simply hate Sun because they need sth. or sbd. to hate, independantly from facts and actions Correcting this attitude is a painfully slow process. p.s. Quite a number of different people are working on continuing to open up more of the "closed-src" black holes, as you know. In different fields. Sun is not blocking this. Of course there could be some funding for projects like emancipation, and paid employees could work on that stuff. But in the open-src world those things get done, which somebody does do. One cannot have the cake and eat it at the same time. pp.s. It would be helpful if the SPARC-gfx group could open-src at least _one_ _single_ of their newly developed Xorg ddx modules. It would be helpful to see how they are able to bus-scan and mmap() directly via the /dev/fb kernel drivers, how the communication interface between the /dev/fb kernel drivers and the new ddx modules looks like (_without_ using libpciaccess, without using aperture/xsvc [?]). So, as you can see, I'm not biased to either side. All I try to do is to stay matter-of-facts-oriented aka "objective", and fair (as much as achieving those goals is actually possible for a human being). Regards, %martin
