NOTE: send an email to Derek Cicero to have your email changed. On Thursday 01 February 2007 06:36 pm, S Destika wrote: > It depends on how you define progress. I agree that most Sun folks feel > they have made good progress but like marketing folks they conveniently > ignore defining and quantifying progress.
No, if you understood the process better, Sun made some huge progress. > >OTOH, I would say most of the community > > folks don't feel it's made > > very much progress at all. Perspective is relative. > > That's true too and Alan I _really_ appreciate that you are the only Sun > employee to admit that. But I think the reality is that OpenSolaris has > made no progress whatsoever and when I say that I will not ignore defining > and quantifying it - I don't think I'm the only Sun person to admit that, I just think I was the first one to suggest/point-out that, but no rocket science. > So let us see what was the prime objective of OpenSolaris - Increase use of > Solaris (Use It), Let the community contribute improvements they need and > love ( Improve It ) and spread it so we further increase use and community > contributions(Evangelize). In regards to these, it will take time to not just put in place, but to help it grow. > 1) Community participation has remained very low. To date greater than 90% > (very unscientific and conservative estimate) of OpenSolaris changes are > driven by Sun's business interests and they come from Sun employees. Yes, because Sun employees are the majority of engineers that understand and can work with the code. A good majority of the folks outside of Sun have not even pulled or looked at the sources. You don't expect the engineers who have been working on this code for man years to just allow any willy-nilly person to have some willy-nilly patch accepted and putback, do you? Do you have a patch/fix that you would like to submit? > nothing there for more > x86 drivers which is what community might benefit from) That's not true at all. There are more drivers today than there have ever been. I am personally working to get community drivers putback. If you could help me get the tests passed that are required for that, I would be very apprceciative for that, but alas the tests are not released yet and there is little you could do to help. Sun is working to get those tests released so people like you could help. Intel just open sourced their e1000g driver, more wireless drivers are being putback, and there are several IHV/OEM drivers that have either been putback or going back. Do you have a specific device that is really preventing you from using Solaris/OpenSolaris? > 2) People do not > feel they own a bit or two of OpenSolaris. Most of them shouldn't as they have done little or no work on it. If you worked on this code for 15 years, you would feel that you are a part of it. This is how the Sun engineers feel, many of them have worked on the code for a good number of years. It is their work that has made our community appreciate the system, enough to be here. > 3) Contributing changes remains hard I expect them to be, and I think the current process does work. It's no easier to do a putback on the inside of Sun, this is where the illusion is. It is hard to do a putback, because there are engineers that are passionate about the product and strive to keep the quality. > I clearly see this as failure in meeting all objectives. Certainly we could list enough objectives that we could look at this as a failure, but as I've pointed out, Sun has made huge strides to open the sources up and there has been participation from folks that have the knowledge and skills to do it. Juergen Keil a case in point. Even before the sources were out, Juergen didn't let that from stopping him from devising patches, some of which patched memory at run time!<yikes!> I'm sure he's much happier to have the sources today. > What should Sun do about this? Get out the way. It's really that simple. Unfortunately I see that as being the exact opposite of what will most likely work. Sun's process and control is what brought Solaris where it is today, and that standard needs to be held in the future or quality will fall, IMO. The key is in getting the community educated on working on the codebase, and understanding why the high standards are there, not to just step out of the way. If Sun would just get out of the way as you suggest, and let the external folks do what they wanted, OpenSolaris would be a real mess. This is what Sun is trying to prevent. > you cannot ignore Linux however you would like. It is not going away, but I don't think the OpenSolaris community is ignoring them, it's just been hard to co-exist with a lot of finger pointing, name calling, and other similar activity. > c) Let > people control changes in OpenSolaris. Let some one unrelated to Sun setup > a SCM and create a fair, inviting and truly open development model where > people can feel they can have a say and drive things and they can be free > to drive the development according to their needs d) Let Sun pull changes > they need from the open, independent tree. And let the independent tree > pull changes they need from Sun's development. No conflict of interest. We're moving to a model where changes will go into OpenSolaris first, then Sun will pull those changes into their own Solaris distribution. This will still take time to hash out and make work, a huge step that has never been attempted previously. > So long as Sun asserts control over this (or even Java) project this isn't > going to get any different - Sun making most changes to Solaris, driven by > their business needs and very insignificant ( both numbers and change > magnitude/impact wise) community contributions. This I believe is spoken out of context. Sun doesn't make changes for their own business case as you state, and often the engineers will do as they want rather than taking management's push, in fact, it is usually the engineers that make the decision of what goes into Solaris, and they let the management know what they're doing. -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 Engineering - IHV/OEM Group Advocate of insourcing at Sun - hire people that care about our company! _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
