On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, James C. McPherson wrote: > I heard that information as well, but from a back-channel and definitely > not out in the open, as it were. When it comes to taking delivery of the > code from LSI I'm taking a "Doubting Thomas" stance.
No, you shouldn't be, and I am certainly not in doubt myself. In this case it's in both Sun and the community's interest to have the vendor of the device maintain the driver, over the long term. You were correct in your previous comment, it has taken at least a year, I think it's older than that. LSI has been working with Sun for a number of years, but these are complicated and/or unusual cases. As an example, I seem to remember (so please don't hold me on this) that the management tools are written using a proprietary framework, which LSI doesn't want to release and/or can't release due to other 3rd party license agreements. But honestly, the OpenSolaris community is very fortunate to get these binaries for the management portion, even the sources are not open. It is a blessing that these pieces are coming together. LSI is not the worst case example of working with vendors, in this case they want to release an open source driver, and both sides have wanted it AFAIK, yet legal issues have plagued various aspects. It is in the communities interest, IMO, to have Sun liason the process with LSI, because they have an entire legal team of their own, just like Sun, and those people understand each other. As many of us know, they understand it very slowly...(this case is a good case in point). >> The LSI driver is open source, I do not know exactly what license it is >> under, but the driver portion is all distributable source. > > That's another aspect - I've heard that it *could* be under CDDL, and > that it might be under some different Open license entirely. Again, > until we see the deliverable pieces, it's still a moot point because > from an OpenSolaris or even Solaris point of view, it doesn't exist. I don't know what the details are, I prefer the 3 Clause BSD license. I have sources released under it, and I also encourage community people to use it as well. It is the only license (AFAIK) that has stood up in a court of law, and it is considered acceptable by more open source licenses, more so than any other single license, IMO. > Great. I'll keep my eyes peeled for it. Likewise...;-) > As I've mentioned to you before, I've had some ideas about this > issue and I'm currently putting them together into a discussion > paper which I will be sending out in the next week or two. I would certainly support such an effort. This is not just a problem for drivers, but for open source software as well. > I don't see this as an insurmountable problem, just one that we > haven't had to deal with much (if at all) in Solaris-land. One that we haven't had to deal with, but it's a very important issue for the community to understand and be able to deal with. -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group
