Peter Tribble wrote:
> Another is that it presumes we (the OGB) have sufficient ownership of the code
> to make it worthwhile. We have no rights to the code, and thus cannot
> dictate what
> gets done with it or how it's licensed.
I was approaching it not from the perspective of rights to the code, but rights
of association - we cannot re-license the code, but we can only admit to the
community and offer to share the community's resources with those who are
contributing code under an acceptable license.
Perhaps it may help to step back and define what the OGB is/does - at the most
basic, one paragraph level, my first draft would be:
The OpenSolaris community consists of thousands of people, who are
all interested in some aspect of the OpenSolaris technology. In
support of these people, Sun Microsystems has chosen to provide
certain resources, like a website and team of people running the
services, in addition to the employment of hundreds of the engineers
actually coding on the project. The OGB's role is to define and
manage the structure of the community to organize these thousands
of people and allow them to use the resources provided to further
the progress of the OpenSolaris technology for the benefit of all.
>From that point of view, we know that Sun's intent in providing these resources
is to further the development of an Open Source operating system. The original
vision was oft described as "like kernel.org - a common source base from which
others, including Sun, build binary distros" - in that environment, a
restriction that everything "produced" by a project on opensolaris.org be pure
open source makes a lot of sense, since code is their primary product. (Though
as noted in the policy draft I suggested, it's not their only product, and for
things like documentation or training videos, other licenses, like Creative
Commons may fit better than those designed for software executables.)
We also know that Sun's goals over time have expanded from the original to
include the building of binary distributions, which may include non-open-source
components. Right now, we're simply ignoring the conflict between the clause
in the current Constitution requiring only open source and the activity taking
place on opensolaris.org in projects such as the Indiana Project. (And I
presume in some of the other distros, though I haven't checked, and Belenix is
the only one I know of using much in the way of OpenSolaris.org resources,
being an outgrowth of the Bangalore Users' Group.)
The previous OGB dealt with this solution by removing that clause from the
Consitution, but some objected to that - the suggestion I had made was a
compromise between the reality of the community expansion to include distros
that aren't 100% pure open source and the desire to keep a requirement that
the community's shared resources be used for the promotion of software that's
at least freely redistributable, if not always freely modifiable.
At some level, the question comes down to whether we want to include or exclude
the builders of distros in our community, knowing that right now, they can't
comply with 100% pure open source requirements (at least until people finish
emancipating core things like libc), and even when they can, may not want to
restrict themselves from including closed software their users may want (be
it RAID drivers, graphics drivers, network drivers, or applications like
acroread).
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
