Keith M Wesolowski wrote: > On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 09:10:56AM -0700, Herman, George wrote: > > >> Sun's policy may be an artifact historic with attempting to protect >> Sparc, but the X86/64 community has not been working under similar >> restrictions. Sun might want to review this policy. >> > > Maybe, but I don't think this is the right place to bring it up. > Project teams are expected to make sound technical decisions about > their work. Substandard work is not allowed to integrate; whether the > work is substandard because of laziness, incompetence, or some > company's legal restrictions on the flow of information makes no > difference. We (the OGB) don't enforce NDAs or manage business > relationships, nor do we lobby or punish companies that make it > artificially difficult for project teams to succeed. Companies that > want their interests reflected in the OpenSolaris codebase are > responsible for ensuring that their employees have the freedom they > need to contribute constructively under the technical rules > established within our Constitutional framework. >
Hmm... not sure I agree completely with the above. Part of OGB's role is to manage OpenSolaris' business relationships with OpenSolaris contributors. One of the largest of those is Sun. If OpenSolaris or OGB makes it arbitrarily difficult for contributions to be made by any contributor, one can expect a reduced level of involvement from impacted project teams or contributors. In the case of Sun, this probably means less open source involvement, and more closed code. Not necessarily a good thing. My point being, I think it is helpful for OGB to be aware of, and consider, the business rules that various contributors (Sun, Intel, AMD, and other companies) play by. It can ask/advise change, but if it tries to enforce hard rules that folks at those companies can't or won't abide, then ultimately it will be the OpenSolaris project that will suffer. In other words, OGB needs to pick and choose its battles wisely, I think. If it is totally inflexible all the time, it will ultimately condemn the project to irrelevance. I'm not sure that the AMD/Intel/SPARC separation versus coordinated development effort is one of the battles that OpenSolaris should be strongly fighting right now, particularly given the other issues of open source and open process that still remain unresolved. -- Garrett PS: No I don't want to get into a debate about whether the separation of Intel/AMD/SPARC IP is the right thing or not. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need lawyers, and we'd all be able to work on this stuff without reservation. But the world we live in is real, and many of us, as employees of companies that have policies written by lawyers who, in theory, are paid to protect the business of those companies, simply cannot ignore those rules, no matter how ridiculous they may seem from an engineering standpoint.
