On Jan 28, 2008 11:33 AM, John Plocher <John.Plocher at sun.com> wrote:
> Ben Rockwood wrote:
> > Let me put this another way... is the only engineering related reason to
> > participate in the OpenSolaris community to putback to the ON gate?
>
> [...obviously OpenSolaris is more than simply the ON gate...]
>
>
> foreach $X in { Thunderbird, WordPress, ApacheHTTPD, Sendmail,...}
> ... Is the only reason to participate in the $X
> community to putback to the $X gate?
> end
>
>
> I'd say, 99% of the time, yes!
>
> Lets optimize for the common expected use case, not the fringe
> "I want to play by myself and fork my own" exception, which is
> IMO already handled by the CDDL. If you want to go off and do
> your own thing, go for it - the *Community* has no obligation
> to help antisocial efforts that will just fragment itself.
So, Belenix, SchilliX, and Nexenta are anti-social?
I believe that telling people "we don't like what you're doing; go do
it elsewhere" is actually the real cause of harmful fragmentation.
Encouraging developers to innovate within the bounds of our community
and providing a place for them to collaborate helps prevent that.
That hardly seems like a "fringe case."
If anything it's a sign that a bigger need in the community isn't
being properly met.
> OTOH, if you are trying to figure out how a community can
> encourage both evolutionary and revolutionary changes to itself,
> the processes referenced earlier (ON dev process, ARC...)
> are designed to easily and actively support both. Maybe there
> are other viable options than simply becoming yet another Apache
> Project...
Those dev processes seem to severely restrict "revolutionary changes"
rather than encourage them.
However, I would like to be proven wrong.
--
Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/
"To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." -
Robert Orben
