On 12/11/2007, John Plocher <John.Plocher at sun.com> wrote: > Shawn Walker wrote: > > I don't think that 100% open source should be a requirement. > > > For a REFERENCE platform, this makes perfect sense - if it isn't > free and reusable, nobody else could make a distro compatible with > the reference...
Again, as long as something is *freely redistributable* I think it's perfectly fine as long as there is no equal equivalent. Wireless drivers come to mind... > I expect Indiana to be made up of a/the reference platform + some special > sauce; furthermore, I expect Sun's version of it to be ref platform > + the indiana sauce + a bunch of closed stuff (drivers...). > > I also expect Schillix (et.al.) to be made up of the reference platform > + their own special sauce (KDE instead of GNOME...) I think we're off on to some weird tangent now. Personally, I'm not interested in a minimalist reference distribution and I don't think it will really serve a true compatibility purpose without having more than just the bare minimum. > > Indiana is pretty darn close though; likely as close as we'll have for > > a little while. > > The things that make Indiana different from SX are a bunch of not-yet-ARC > reviewed or approved prototypes. That makes it difficult to commit to them > as part of a compatibility reference.... Of course; but once Indiana replaces SXCE, which by all accounts it will, I assume it will have finished ARC, etc. so that will be a moot point. > > 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." > > We are not talking about "any distro", but rather a specially blessed > reference. > > Your points all apply to those others... Yes, and that specially blessed reference should include useful bits; if you exclude the most useful bits, you kind of make it pointless to have. A reference distro without drivers that no alternative exists for is doomed to be nothing more than a distro that no one uses hardly. -- 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
