Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> John Plocher wrote:
>> James Carlson <carlsonj at workingcode.com> wrote:
>>> .. Thus "FOSS is special."
>>
>> I believe FOSS *IS* Special - because doing a good job of integrating
>> general cross-platform FOSS into OpenSolaris is actually HARDER than
>> integrating something invented by the community specifically for the
>> OS itself.
>
> So it's not the FOSS license that makes it special - it's the external
> control, for which we may or may not have some contribution to, that's
> the difference. Is there really any difference in the architecture
> of integrating Xorg's open source nvidia driver vs. Nvidia's proprietary
> driver? In neither case do we have control - we can influence both
> upstream sources to make changes, but once they publish a version, we
> are limited in the amount of changes we can or should make as we
> integrate it to Solaris.
There is a fundamental point in the decision tree that I think folks are
omitting. That is, we don't have to *integrate* the software at all.
We might decide that the software is important enough to set aside some
architectural considerations, but we can also decide simply that a bit
of software is not suited for integration. (In which case there are
several other ways forward -- including leaving the bits unbundled (or
in contrib) and seeking a resolution for whatever considerations are
most concerning with the upstream supplier.
So, we have a lot more control than you might realize. While we can't
force upstream sources to bend to our will, we certainly don't have to
abdicate control over our operating system to such upstream sources.
Fortunately, it rarely comes to such loggerheads. In most cases, there
are reasonable compromises that can be made either by us or by the
upstream sources, when there are such severe architectural considerations.
-- Garrett
