On 26/10/2007, Brandorr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 10/26/07, Shawn Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 26/10/2007, Brandorr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On 10/26/07, John Plocher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Brandorr wrote: > > > > > It seems this discussion is not leading anywhere. And Sun is doing > > > > > what Sun is going to do. > > > > > > > > So, lead it where you want it to go. Make a proposal! > > > > > > > > Don't just sit there and complain. > > > > > > > > > I'll tell you why. It's a falicy, OpenSolaris is actually the more > > > > > valuable brand at this point. > > > > > > > > Glad you think so. And, maybe to you, it is. All the more reason for > > > > you to suggest how you think we should use it! > > > > > > > > You obviously don't like my suggestions: > > > > > > > > 1) Don't wish to use the name /.*OpenSolaris.*/ ? > > > > no problem, do what you want... > > > > > > > > 2) Wish to use it, and are "compatible"? > > > > Use "___, an OpenSolaris Operating System" or > > > > "Compatible with OpenSolaris" > > > > > > > > 3) Wish to use it, and aren't "compatible"? > > > > Use "Built on OpenSolaris" or > > > > "Built with OpenSolaris Technology" or > > > > other phrases that don't imply compatibility. > > > > > > > > so again I ask you - please make a counter proposal. Be part of > > > > the solution! > > > > > > Proposal: No distro will be named OpenSolaris. The definition of > > > OpenSolaris will not be changed just to suit Sun's marketing needs. I > > > > First of all, this isn't about suiting "Sun's marketing needs." This > > is about meeting user expectations and the needs of the OpenSolaris > > community. Having a reference distribution is about meeting user > > expectations. Having it named OpenSolaris is about meeting user > > expectations. > > It is 100% about Sun's marketing needs. To think otherwise is completely naive
That's a rather subjective way of putting it; one you haven't justified. Please explain to me how this is not abut meeting Sun's marketing needs in detail. Please explain to me why the development of a set of usage guidelines for a trademark that represents the community isn't in the community's interests. > > > know this isn't a discussion of what is and isn't Sun's prerogative, > > > but you asked for a proposal, and I am asking Sun *NOT* to do > > > something, and I feel that a counterproposal should have a viable > > > alternative. Part of that counterprosal is a name that works. > > > > Sun is not involved here other than being owner of a trademark and > > asking the community to help define the usage guidelines. > > Really? Sun is basically trying to figure out how to call their distro > OpenSolaris. When I say Sun's distro, I mean the distro that was > speced out, prototyped and developed (for most of it's life at this > point) behind Sun firewalls. This distro does have proprietary closed Considering how short that life has been, it wasn't behind any walls very long. > source bits. (Last I checked they haven't been removed yet). Sun has What proprietary, closed source bits are you talking about? If you're talking about i18n and the sparc dissasembler, I'm sure you know that these are the process of being replaced. What specific bits are you talking about? The community and Sun's goal has been to replace these few remaining bits. Even if these few bits are closed and Sun has no legal right to open them, they at least have secured the right others to redistribute them. I don't see how you can have any reasonable expectation beyond that. > made no indication that "Open"Solaris will be 100% open source, even > though article II of the constitution states that any OpenSolaris > software must be 100% opensource. Actually, it says: "All software produced by the OpenSolaris Community shall be licensed to the public free of charge under one or more open source licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative." Note that some of the software that is closed right now was not produced by the OpenSolaris community. It was produced by Sun and third parties or by third parties alone which is why it is not open source. > It's as much a Sun distro as SXCE is. It's also just as much > OpenSolaris as SXCE is. How so? > > Wrong. You need to get this idea that Sun is the one behind this; > > they're not. It's just saying that only the distribution designated as > > the reference distribution *by the OpenSolaris community* would be > > called OpenSolaris. > > Huh? If not Sun and Sun management, then whom? Again, Sun employees are part of the OpenSolaris community. They have no more voting rights than we do. If this was being purely driven by Sun management, then why would they bother asking us anything at all? Why would they give the community a chance to be involved in the process of determining usage guidelines? > > The community has the ability to through communities to get a vote to > > happen to change what the reference distribution is. In addition, > > there is nothing that says Sun has to be the one to produce the > > binaries. > > > > > If the decision to use OpenSolaris as a distro name is for Sun or > > > noone, then I'd rather no one use it. So I guess I don't want > > > OpenSolaris to be the name of any distro. > > > > It isn't for Sun or noone. It is for the community's reference > > distribution that best represents OpenSolaris. > > No it isn't. How can it be the community's reference distro if no one > has had a chance to evaluate it against other candidates? No other candidates have made a formal proposal to set themselves as the reference distribution. Since Indiana is the only project started so far by anyone connected to the community, it has the best chance of winning. If you want to see another distribution "win", then you need to see that formal project is started and it has a chance to get chosen as the reference distribution. As it was mentioned at the summit, the OpenSolaris community is largely a meritocracy; the folks doing they work get to make most of the decisions. If you want to see something different happen, encourage others to work to see that happen. > > Which is wrong. Indiana is not a Sun distribution. Indiana is a > > distribution proposed by a member of the OpenSolaris community that > > works for Sun. If someone from Intel had proposed Indiana would you > > then want to call it the "Intel Indiana OpenSolaris Distro"? > > "This is wrong". On what basis are you making that claim? If the > distro in question was a) proposed by intel, b) mostly developed > behind Intel firewalls, and c) designed behind Intel firewalls and/or > d) included prprietary Intel source code, I'd have to say it can be > "Intel Indiana OpenSolaris distro" (I don't think it's a good name > though).. b) and c) and d) are not fair or reasonable for reasons I already explained above. > > Which is going to be incredibly confusing to users. > > I think it's pretty clear. I have faith in our users.. Then you haven't been reading slashdot or OSNews much every time a new Solaris Express release comes out. > > When I go to Ubuntu.com, I expect to download something called Ubuntu. > > > > When I go to FreeBSD.org, I expect to download something called FreeBSD. > > > > ...the list goes on. > > When you go to Linux.org and BSD.org, do you expect to be able to > download something called Linux or BSD? It all depends on the users of the target audience. For whatever reason, users don't have that expectation with Liunx.org or BSD.org The reason is probably that Linux didn't start with a centralised community. We did. There is no one site the represents the Linux community. There is one site that represents the OpenSolaris community. That makes user expectations wildly different. > > The problem with this, again, is that you are portraying the proposed > > reference distribution as a Sun product; it is not. It is a product of > > the OpenSolaris community. At this point, the majority of the > > OpenSolaris community happens to work for Sun. > > Well, it seems Sun marketing has at least one person fooled. I really don't appreciate the personal insinuation. The facts are that most of the voting OpenSolaris community members are from Sun; as such people are always going to be able to accuse Sun of making the decisions. However, it should be quite obvious by now that most Sun engineers do not "tow the company line." > > > It seems that many in the community seem to feel that the OpenSolaris > > > name should not be bestowed to a [proprietary, closed source] Sun > > > distro. > > > > Where has it ever been said that a proprietary, closed source Sun > > distro would receive the OpenSolaris name? > > Go talk to the Indiana developers. I have; I have never heard anything about this. > > > It also seems that many feel that the current definition of > > > OpenSolaris shouldn't change. Currently no distro can use the > > > OpenSolaris trademark as part of their name. I am starting to see the > > > wisdom of that decision by the founders of the community. > > > > Experience has proven that users expect otherwise. > > Experience has shown that Sun executives are actively muddying the > water, by making naming promises before they have been agreed to by > the community. For that matter the whole Indiana as OpenSolaris thing > was told to the press before being raised with the community. Not > only that, since then, the press have been repeatedly told that > Indiana will be "OpenSolaris". > > I don't know how you can look at Indiana as anything other than Sun's distro. Because people that aren't from Sun have contributed to it. That's how I can look at it as something other than Sun's distro. If it was truly just Sun's distro; why have a summit? Why bother asking for anyone else's input? Why bother listening to users? Why spend months trying to get people to be involved in the decisions being made? Why not just decide it all behind closed doors after a year of closed work (as you claim) and just launch the new item? I can't believe you think there is a vast conspiracy at work here. > > Even if you don't want to allow anyone to use OpenSolaris as their > > name you still have not properly addressed what you think should be > > *all of the allowed possible usages* of the trademark and what the > > possible restrictions might be. > > I have, and the discussions were all "tabled" or "parking lotted". > Take compatibility for example. The proposal states that we follow the > Sun recipe.(I mean "community recipe"). Currently the recipe, is a > file list of binaries to download from Sun's servers. Someone can't > compile their own distro from source, and make a "compatible distro". It's hard to take your arguments seriously when you constantly take small snipes at Sun. No, someone can't currently compile their own distro from source and *claim* compatability because we currently have no way to verify that it is actually compatible. It is of benefit to users that they *know* something is compatible for certain. > A compatibility test, that says, "verify that this is the same exact > set of bits" is an audit, not a compatibility test. You are defining > compatibility in such a way that only the thing being tested against > can be considered compatible. Take for example x86. Intel defined x86, > and AMD made a compatible implementation, that was not neccesarily the > same set of bits. It is still binary compatible. Compaq, made an IBM > PC compatible machine. AMD has licensing agreements with Intel so that they could use certain trademarks and technology in certain ways. So it's not the same. > As an example of real world Solaris compatibility look at Transient's > work making Sparc Solaris binaries run on Linux. (I haven't looked too > closely, but I think we might be able to declare this is binary > compatible.) > > Currently I can take Blastwave packages compiled for Solaris 8, and > install and run them on Solaris 8, Solaris 9, Solaris 10, SX[CD]E > b1-75, Nexenta, Martux, etc. Are these distros incompatible or > compatible? Who knows for certain without a verifiable compatibility test. The applications might work, they might not. > A compatibility test might consist of a installing and running a given > set of SYSV packages, plus running a slew of OS commands to verify > that the behavior came out as expected. (There are 1500+ packages in > Blastwave, maybe we can somehow leverage their packages to build a > compatibility suite). > > Before you say there is no way to guarantee compatibility between > different Solaris builds, I'd say that it depends on what you mean by > guarantee. I haven't said that, nor do I plan to. Obviously there's a POSIX test suite to verify compatibility so the same could be done here. > But then again this whole compatibility discussion, predicates that as > a community we have consensus on a need for an OpenSolaris reference > distro. I don't recall any community vote saying that need exists. How > can we write guidelines, presuming the existence of such a beast? Actually, if you go back to the last OpenSolaris OGB election, you'll note that compatibility was a big topic in the OpenSolaris community. As a result, I think it's a logical conclusion that users like compatibility and feel better when they have their expectations met. Just as users like to be able to go the store and buy a game or application and know that is supposed to run on their copy of Windows Vista according to claims by the manufacturer because it says "Made for Windows Vista." It's also valuable to developers like me who want to be able to build an application on a single OpenSolaris distribution and be able to guarantee that it should run without modification on any other distribution that claims to be compatible. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. " --Donald Knuth _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
