Peter Dennis - Sustaining Engineer wrote: > Garrett D'Amore wrote: >> I've been contemplating setting up a community repo that could >> reintegrate some of the platform support that is being removed from ON >> proper, into a separate "legacy" consolidation, that would not be >> supported by Sun. > > I think that this would be an interesting and valuable thing to be done. > A place to put legacy code that can be maintained (and supported...) > by the folks interested.
Interesting and valuable if it can be done. This isn't the first time such a thing has been discussed, and in the previous runs at the problem, the real issue is not the mechanics of setting up and maintaining a separate gate, but rather that 99 and 44/100ths of the effort is actually a legal review to determine what -- if anything at all -- can be released, and under what terms. If there isn't enough to maintain the code as the OS evolves, what's the chance that there's enough money to do a detailed legal analysis sufficient for release? Talk with Bonnie Corwin before going too far down this path. It's not as simple as you might imagine. It's not just that the copyrights on the code have to be checked; everything about it has to be checked. Were there contractors involved? What documentation was used to develop the code? Are there any legal agreements recorded for it? I know of several cases where we were unable to ship driver source code because a "proprietary" manual for the device was used in development. It didn't matter that some later version of the manual in question was released to the public. It didn't matter that all of the engineers on the project were regular Sun employees. It didn't matter that the device was long obsolete. When we had the vendor's document, it was marked confidential, and that was enough to cause the code to be withheld. -- James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <carlsonj at workingcode.com>
