> >> Here's how I interpret all of this: I think they're shifting some > >> percentage of developers from opensolaris to solaris. Instead of > >> letting > >> opensolaris lead the way, and "trickle down" with open source > >> contributions > >> to solaris ... Solaris will lead the way, and contributions will > trickle > >> down to opensolaris, sometimes closed source. > >> > >> > > It's rather difficult for stuff to trickle up hill. OpenSolaris is a > > long way ahead of Solaris and things will continue that way at least > > until Solaris Next. > > > > More likely the OS development will remain as is and it will be the > > value add features that will be closed. > As I'm not on the Solaris/OpenSolaris team, I can't say for certain, > but > as someone who has worked in the Hotspot VM group of Java now for 6 > years (I'm the Hotspot buildmaster), and longer in large development > projects, let me say that new features ALWAYS appear in the development > branch first, THEN are backported to the older "stable" releases as > time > and demand occurs. No one does new original development work on a > stable release. In rare cases, you can't actually do a backport, and
You're right, of course it doesn't make sense to do the new experimental development work on the solaris codebase and reverse the flow of new things going from solaris to opensolaris. But it's still possible to shift some of the development effort off from opensolaris and onto solaris ... Which would mean either a stronger effort to port existing improvements, or to seriously start pushing for Next. Let the opensolaris development slow down a little bit for a while, in order to accelerate the release of Next. I know if I were working for Oracle, that would make total sense to me. As a matter of branding, they could even change the name. Instead of calling it "solaris next" they could simply call it "oracle next." All the solaris-heads would know what that means, so they wouldn't be alienating any existing userbase. But they could emphasize the new and unique features such as ZFS, and would be breaking off the public perception of solaris as a dinosaur. Sun was always the company that we admins wished we didn't love, but just couldn't help ourselves. The company that stood for everything good in the world, but just couldn't execute. Oracle will surely want to reimage this, and emphasize that they're a new and effective real viable contender for reliable and solid enterprise technology. Most admins ... the first thing they associate with the word "solaris" is "Don't unplug the keyboard, OK?" and "Please please please, don't eject the floppy unless you follow this instruction..." It would be nice to change this image to "Next is a cool new version of a stable operating system, that's been around for years, that does tons of awesome stuff I never knew about before..." _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
