Hugh McIntyre wrote:
Stephen Harpster writes:
Very unlikely that a source fork will happen. Let's face it. Most of
the people who know and understand all the intricacies of OpenSolaris
source code work at Sun. Who's going to fork? How will they maintain
that fork? Constantly chase opensolaris.org? And what happens if their
new incompatible changes don't work with the changes they pull from
opensolaris.org? It's not practical and I can't imagine it happening.
As well as the example Jim says, the other likely more scenario is:
* Someone takes a small-but-interesting part of OpenSolaris such as ZFS
(rather than the whole thing), and ports this to run on Linux.
* This gets released as GPLv3 only, and is hosted somewhere else. Not
because of an intentional fork, but because the code needed to be changed
and the contributors don't want to submit a bunch of ARC reviews for
permission to add "#ifdef LINUX" all over the ZFS code, OpenSolaris does
not want to take Linux-only changes, or other completely valid reasons.
[1]
* A bunch of new and interesting features get added, but are GPLv3-only.
Again, not necessarily because of any intent to be anti-CDDL, but just
because the project is forked.
* OpenSolaris proper can't then use the enhancements due to the license.
Next step, and one that is more likely:
* Sun's ZFS team put in more interesting features. But these don't work
with the features that went into the fork. Sorry! And since to-date,
the majority of ZFS developers work at Sun, it's likely for the
foreseeable future that the ZFS in opensolaris.org will stay ahead of
the fork.
Granted the GPL v2/v3 conflict may make this more difficult for the Linux
kernel proper. But maybe not impossible.
Hugh.
[1] For example, I don't think there's any existing "#ifdef APPLE" in the
Dtrace code. Which means a fork already happened.
My same example as well. :-)
--
Stephen Harpster
Director, Open Source Software
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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