On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 20:09 +0200, Milan Jurik wrote:
> Hi Matthew,
> 
> I know I'm not right man who should answer you, as I'm from Sun... But
> look at it from another perspective:
> 
> V po, 06. 08. 2007 v 19:18, Kaiwai Gardiner píše:
> > Agreed, but at the same driver - are drivers *truely* that secret? I
> > mean, wpi for 3945 was developed in 'secret' - why? what possible loss
> > of competitive advantage would it yield? looking at it from my angle,
> > all I see are positives by way of consumers actually seeing and knowing
> > that Sun are making/porting drivers to Solaris.
> > 
> 
> Are you sure that Sun employees had access to 3945 development except
> the developer of it? The most of them didn't know about it. And it is
> way how distributed development happens - somebody (or some team) is
> working on something till point it is "compilable" or "usable" or just
> "publicable". The level of this point is on the developer decision, as
> usual in open source world. Some developers are publishing all their
> steps, some are publishing something usefull for users. You had the
> access to source code of wpi at the same time as the most of Sun
> employees. Today you can find on bugs.opensolaris.org the responsible
> engineer for all accepted RFEs, why not to contact him if you want to
> help with development and/or testing of some particular RFE?

BUt at the same time - if the 'community' knew that wpi was being worked
on - Sun might have actually found people helping port it to Solaris :-)

A small hear-ye hear-ye would have been on order.

> > I mean, if they're going to worry about 'competitive advantage' then why
> > announce to the world support for a product that doesn't yet exist in
> > the marketplace/still in development?
> > 
> 
> I don't think that in wpi case it was about competitive advantage. It
> was just way how the most of drivers in open source are developed - by
> some small team (typically with just one member), which is publishing
> their results when they are ready for public, per their decision. You
> can go and ask for source codes earlier if you want. And maybe the team
> will do it for you.

But the driver is opensource and ported by Sun - I know about the
existance of wpi, what I didn't know about was Sun porting it to
Solaris.

> And I don't know why File Events Notification API - PSARC/2007/027 is
> not public. You can see who made the putback - ask him, maybe he is not
> reading this list.

Its very hard to know when there is no name attached to the put back as
far as I see.

> > Things should be merged into the public tree, just like they're merged
> > inside the company. Everything that occurs inside Sun should occur at
> > the same time on the other side - if a case log as been updated, then it
> > should be accessible to the public.
> > 
> 
> But wpi wasn't merged to Sun tree significantly sooner (it tooks few
> minutes, that sync between ON gate inside and outside). The developer
> worked on his source code in his own workspace. As usual.

Would it be better to put documentation out there before the code?

> > Its all about transparency in the development process; and if it means
> > that developers think out aloud on ideas - I'd sooner see Sun
> > programmers conduct regular brain farts on a blog and know there is some
> > cranium activity about future Solaris development than just sitting on
> > the side lines praying something is occurring in the deep crypt of Sun.
> > 
> 
> Did you look at RFEs? Did you look at PSARCs? Did you look at projects
> on opensolaris.org? And can you show me some really big project where
> all developers are informing community about their actual work and
> future plans?
> 
> Please, leave the decision about their openness on developers. Some
> prefer public development (lots of Sun employee), some are working in
> their own workspaces (lots of Sun employee).
> 
> You want just big amount of paperwork from us ;-) I hope the community
> is not my second manager asking for weekly reports...

Its about communication - I'm generally not a person who likes to
communicate anything with anyone - I generally speaking keep people on a
'need to know' basis - but at the same time, there is a need to inform
the community on what is happening.

Tell the community what they're working on - and shock horror, they
might actually find that a few of the great unwashed might actually be
interested in contributing.

Matthew

_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]

Reply via email to