"Garrett D'Amore" <Garrett.Damore at sun.com> writes:
> Yes. I think part of the problem here is that Sun decides the rules for
> ON, ultimately. We might like to pretend that this is a community
> project, but really there is still a benevolent dictator in the form of
> the C-Team, which is at present a Sun entity.
>
> That will be true until Sun hands over control of the gate, and allows
> non-Sun folks to both be RTI advocates, and to sit on the C-Team. Right
> now the C-Team runs almost completely subservient to Sun's P-teams (e.g.
> the OpenSolaris distro business team) -- hence Sun's business interests,
> and gives *no* real thought or consideration to what other folks in the
> community want, or to other distributions. (Well, to be fair, they
> might think about such things, but if there is no marketing demand for
> something, then it probably doesn't carry any weight in the decision.)
>
> (For example, UltraSPARC-I support that Rainer did, will probably never
> get reintroduced into ON. Why not? Because Sun doesn't want it, and
> can't support it.)
I think there's the problem: you assume that only things that Sun can and
will support can live in ON. But this assumption is not necessarily true:
when I discussed UltraSPARC-I revival with Stephen Hahn 2 or 3 years ago,
he seems to have been in contact with Sun Legal about the wording of a
message from (then) ufsboot/inetboot about US-I being not supported. With
that proviso, it seems that the revival code could have gone in.
Obviously, we have to keep the code in ON building, but why should the
support burden fall only on Sun? This way we could avoid an expensive fork
(especially in this case where the changes are trivial: just a few lines of
code and a couple of symlinks).
Allowing something like this would be an important sign of goodwill by Sun
to the community. Otherwise, this whole thread makes it obvious that much
of this talk about a community is just that: talk, contradicted by actions.
Rainer
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Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University
