Yes, but the same argument holds. This can happen today. CDDL has file
boundaries. You can create a fork of ZFS and innovate all you want. If
your innovations remain in separate files, you don't have to publish
them or contribute them back.
Mark A. Carlson wrote:
Isn't it more likely that folks would cherry-pick projects off
of Open Solaris for forking/re-hosting?
OpenZFS.org
OpenDtrace.org
...
-- mark
James Carlson wrote:
Stephen Harpster writes:
No, they won't. According to 'whois', it looks like
"reallyopensolaris.org" hasn't been registered yet, and would be an
excellent place to set up a rival community.
OpenSolaris is a Sun trademark, so don't count on it. ;-)
Fine. "openos.org" is also available, and easier to type.
Those who are willing to consent to dual-licensing today with the
possibility of additional licenses to be named in the future might go
to opensolaris.org. The rest would go to the other site, and use GPL
alone.
No they won't. Where will innovation occur? That's what people really
care about. Who will work on reallyopensolaris.org and who will work on
opensolaris.org? Most of the developers, for good or bad, are employed
by Sun and will continue to develop on opensolaris.org. The rest of the
world can pull from reallyopensolaris.org, but that code base will get
old and crusty pretty fast.
I think we're coming down the the crux of the matter here.
I agree that if we think like customers and end users of Solaris then,
yes, it's innovation and branding and patch delivery and support that
matter.
However, if we think like contributors to an open source project, what
matters is the openness and speed of the process, the transparency of
the licensing, the ability to contribute *directly* to the code,
ownership of the results, and an equal footing for those involved.
Assuming that growing the opensolaris.org community is the intended
purpose, adding a new license to the mix does not in fact advance any
of those issues. It makes a rival community that _does_ address those
issues possible, while it actually adds complexity and risk to our
existing community.
That still seems like a net loss, as I'm rather convinced that the
fork will in fact happen, whether we think it's feasible or not.
(For what it's worth, and it may not be much, I believe the very same
issues affected the Zebra/Quagga split. Integration into Zebra was
considered by quite a few to be difficult, and the folks who started
the project apparently felt they held the important cards. Now it
seems that's not quite the case.)
No matter how much I think of sun.com, and it's quite a bit, I'm not
so willing to bet that the only smart, talented, capable people
available are already here.
--
Stephen Harpster
Director, Open Source Software
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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