On 12/11/2007, Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at sun.com> wrote: > > If we are going to endorse a distro as our reference or blessed or whatever > distro, what are the requirements it has to meet? > > Here's a list of ones I can think of to start discussing from: > > 1) 100% Open Source: The OpenSolaris Constitution, as approved by the > voting members of the community and the Solaris management at Sun, > requires: > > All software produced by the OpenSolaris Community shall be > licensed to the public free of charge under one or more open > source licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative.
I don't think that 100% open source should be a requirement. Otherwise, it might be a very long time before we get somewhere. Not only that, requiring 100% open source precludes the ability to include binary blobs for network drivers, etc. that there might be very liberal redistribution rights for. Note that it says all software *produced* by the OpenSolaris community; to me that implies that software not produced by us is exempt. I would consider binary blobs for networking, video, etc. to be exempt as a result :) The distribution is merely an aggregation of software, after all... > 2) Decisions about the distro will all be made by an OpenSolaris community > group in accordance with the constitution (which can be oversimplified > down to "just do it" for simple/obvious things, "quick e-mail consensus" > when the answer isn't so clear, "formal vote" for the important things. > See Article VIII for the full details). As long as said community group is properly scoped; if we end up with too many people with voting rights, we'll end up in deadlock. > 3) All components architecturally reviewed in the open by the process and > groups established by the OpenSolaris Architecture Process and Tools > community. Whole-heartedly agree. > 4) Supports the platforms designated as Core Platforms by a community > process TBD (initially SPARC 4u/4v & x86/x64). Indeed. > At the moment, I don't know of any distro that meets all of these, not even > Indiana, though it and a couple others may be able to achieve them with a bit > of work. Indiana is pretty darn close though; likely as close as we'll have for a little while. > Software that didn't meet those rules (closed source binaries, NDA covering > ARC review) could still be installed on the distro, but couldn't be a core > part of it. I disagree with this for the reasons I listed above. Good work and drivers shouldn't be excluded as long as sufficient redistribution rights are available for them. We don't want to handicap ourselves just to be able to claim "100% open source." -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor..." --Larry Wall
