On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 7:21 PM, Peter Tribble <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 12:09 AM, Steven Acres <[email protected]> > wrote: > > All, > > > > The best model to look at IMHO is redhat/fedora. This was the initial > > proving ground of opensource (otherwise known as: how do we make money > from > > something we give away?) Furthering that: CentOS. > > The redhat/fedora model draws interesting parallels. There was a huge > uproar when redhat got out of the free (and consumer) market. Seems > to have worked out reasonably well for them. > > Then it took a while for fedora to actually stand on its own. I suspect > we're much closer to the rehat/fedora model at its beginning than we > are to its present state. > > Fedora is now quite successful, but it wasn't an easy ride. If that is a > valuable model to consider, how do we get to that from where we are now? > > That's an interesting question. RedHat has always built their distribution product mainly on software that was created outside their company. That means they have had to interact with an outside community of developers and, most importantly, decision makers who owned their piece of work that this company was hoping to integrate/improve/shape into one of its products. That requires getting your attitude right and not being (too) evil. I'm far from knowing how to take a closed project like Solaris to a half-open OpenSolaris and all the way through the Fedora/RHEL model but I know it won't be easy let alone possible if hard decisions are avoided. We have just heard these days that a staging server is down and that's why b138 isn't available. We also heard that it can't be made available on an external server because of legal reasons. How can an open source project work smoothly when a development build can't be made available easily ? It seems hard enough to get all the technical pieces together and it still has to go through a legal bottleneck to release an experimental build ? This shows that there are bureaucratic obstacles holding the project back. Someone will say the 2010.3 and the b134 builds are Oracle's OpenSolaris binary distribution based on the OpenSolaris code base and they are within their right to release it whenever they want, if they want, the way they want it. These same people will point you to all other "distros" out there if you are not happy with Oracle's distro. Right.... let me tell you one thing: OpenSolaris is NOT big enough to afford fragmentation. Oracle should be doing everything it can to aggregate people around their so called binary distribution and not away where work will be splitted. It should be welcoming contribution and feedback and providing clear communication, not making decisions inside their firewall. This is "open source 101". IMHO, the whole "codebase" vs. "binary distribution" talk is a silly and stupid idea. There should be an OS called OpenSolaris and that's it. People would participate in creating the best OS they had in their minds, committing code and seeing the results. The way things are now it looks like what OpenSolaris is is a "consortium" of some kind. I remember reading an article from 2006/2007 where someone from Sun said how great OpenSolaris was and mentioned all these companeis that were oficially partnering up with them to develop code. Right... that could happen without it being open source in the first place. AFAIK, FreeBSD releases what they call "snapshot" ISOs every month as clockwork. Fedora let's you download version 13-Alpha any time you feel like doing so and they even encourage people to put a silly countdown clock on their blogs to tell the world when a new release is coming. So does Ubuntu. We can't even be sure when b138 will be out ? And more importantly, we can't even know the technical issues behind 2010.x delay so we can help fixing them ? People have asked for that (about show stoppers) and the answer was "there is someone inside that makes that call, it's not discussed publicly though". That's not very welcoming to outside contributions. In the end this all boils down to: does Oracle/Sun view the Fedora/RHEL model as something worth it ? We don't know and we shouldn't be the ones begging for answers... they should make their plans clear. People have said it is very hard to open source a huge project like OpenSolaris and I agree. I just get the feeling Sun came late to the party and Oracle has no intention of hurrying up. In fact I think in a few months we are likely to see a "open core" model slowly taking place. I'm probably going to be flamed for even mentioning this 3-word company here but I was reading an article some weeks ago about a few things IBM learned while doing Linux kernel development [1] and the following paragraph made me think of OpenSolaris: "We spent far too much time behind the IBM firewall, discussing things, and we tried to polish our external communications," Frye said. "So we banned internal IBM communication on the Linux kernel. Anyone working on the kernel at IBM was not allowed to talk to anyone else inside the company. All communications had to be external." Like I said in another emails, people shouldn't be trying to shut down these talks while saying "wait and see". Despite occasional trolls, most people are complaining because they care about OpenSolaris and not because they would like to see it die. It's going to be a sad month when nobody ever asks when 2010.x will be released. And If I'm getting everything wrong... I would be very happy to hear *officially* from Oracle what they envision for OpenSolaris in details. That way we can all adjust our expectations and consciously conform to the model being proposed or go away. To the Oracle employees reading this, please don't take it personal. You guys do an awesome work and we are very glad about that. It's just that the people on the higher ranks should start doing some productive work (even if it's telling everybody to go away). Some useful links: http://fedoraproject.org/en/join-fedora https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/13/Schedule http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/ReleaseCriteria http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Final_Release_Criteria http://www.freebsd.org/releng/ [1] http://www.cioupdate.com/features/article.php/3876581/You-Cant-Control-Linux.htm -- Giovanni
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