On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 08:53:16PM -0500, Robert W. Fuller wrote: > Open source and free software for many participants is about scratching > an itch. If you let people scratch their itch by enabling them to > support their old hardware, the effect is that they learn about the > source code and the project. Hence, it makes sense to help people to > work on projects important to them, even if Sun does not see immediate > value in their work. This is a more forward looking, long-term focus, > than a short-term one.
Good points all, and the same apply to other requests I've seen of this type such as for sun4m support. If these pieces of functionality had not been removed well prior to the release of Solaris 10, I'm sure we would have released them with the rest of the operating system (legal considerations permitting, of course). It's not impossible, of course, to do the tedious and time-consuming legal analysis on all this code (not to mention the closure set of its dependencies) and, assuming that doesn't turn up any problems, release that as a one-off. For obvious reasons, it wouldn't build or work on any extant OpenSolaris system, making it of dubious utility to any but the most dedicated individuals. But more to the point, the small group of people who might be detailed to those tasks are busy doing much higher-leverage work - like moving us to a universally-available SCM and more open development processes. These are efforts that affect more or less everyone who wants to do anything with any of the code and doesn't work for Sun, and they are critical to the long-term health and productivity of the engineering community. At best, bits like SunPCi and sun4m are of interest to a handful of people. It's unfortunate, but under the circumstances I can't fault the Tonic team's prioritisation. And so I doubt very much that the code in question will ever see the light of day. I'm sorry to say so, but someone might as well. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
