On Nov 12, 2007 7:24 PM, 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?
0. Do we endorse one, many, or any that qualify? > 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. Are distributions produced software? I think that for a distribution, free redistribution would be a reasonable requirement; open source may prevent a distribution from offering important functionality. The constitution also comes from an environment in which we were a codebase and not a distribution. If our focus changes do we need to look at things differently? > 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). So any community can come up with a distribution? Sounds like a recipe for chaos to me. Even a distribution community doesn't work for me under the current constitution, as it is responsible for determining its own direction rather than respecting the overall wishes of the community. And, if we had something that was *the* OpenSolaris distro, I would expect wider acountability. > 3) All components architecturally reviewed in the open by the process and > groups established by the OpenSolaris Architecture Process and Tools > community. Definitely. > 4) Supports the platforms designated as Core Platforms by a community > process TBD (initially SPARC 4u/4v & x86/x64). This presumes that there's only one; in the case of multiple distributions I could imagine some being targeted at specific architectures to address particular segments. (Maybe "OpenSolaris laptop edition"?) > 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. > > 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. > > -- > -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com > Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering > > _______________________________________________ > ogb-discuss mailing list > ogb-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/ogb-discuss > -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
