On 02/03/2010 14:24, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
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.
How does it differ from old Sun or actually any other software company
or even open source communities?
Developers are a finite resource and if you want to provide a new stable
release you will need "someone" to make it happen.
Unless you think that Sun had some developers just sitting for several
years and waiting for a new solaris release to be released so they can
finally do something... :P
--
Robert Milkowski
http://milek.blogspot.com
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