(clippage) "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."
you seem upset that there are legal reasons for some things. We have to follow the law, and I'm sorry if that offends you. Until all code which others have a claim to is out, there is going to be hangups. The emancipation project is working on this, but there is a large number of utilities to work through, especially considering the need to maintain standards compliance (something else most linux distros don't bother with). (clipped) "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." We in many ways ARE a consortium. There are a number of different agendas to get OS optimized to perform different tasks. I have two different ones myself (both my personal one, and my employer's). Personally I'm interested in desktop/workstation usage, my employer is interested in only storage servers. The OSOL the code-base vs. OSOL the OS is a historical anomaly. "Open Solaris" was already in use for the codebase, but some in Sun felt the need to reuse it for a binary distribution as well. It probably should have been branded something else, like "Solaris-Next" or some-such, and there was quite a bit of argument from the community over it. I believe the archives still remain, if you are interested. In any case those of us who started before "Open Solaris" was a distribution are not going to change our language because of some historical revisionists, besides we don't have another word to use anyway. "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." Very rarely are the /dev releases delayed significantly (which is the equivalent to what you describe). The reason I have been given for them being posponed are quite reasonable. The delay of /release is unfortunate, but expected in the case of some types of bugs. Ideally there would be no bugs, but some of us have to live in the real world. The reality is delaying /release to deal with a major bug is far better then the alternative. "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." >From their press releases and announcements, it seems clear enough what the >general intent is. If they presented exact timetables for everything there >would be the same number of people complaining when things where missed. "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."" That's vary easy for IBM's linux contributions, because they aren't talking about things that others have claims to. "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 what is it accomplishing? Yes, they care, fine, great, wonderful even, but the complaining just adds to the "noise" part of the sig/noise ratio. It's not helping, It's not going to change anything, and at this point nothing is even being added. We have all already heard it. "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." It would be nice, but (and this has been said before) Oracle does not tend to announce things until they are ready to go. The up side of this is less vapor-ware. The downside is useless speculation and FUD. (clippage, if you are really interested read gtirloni's full messge) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
