On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Peter Tribble <peter dot tribble at gmail dot com> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Mark Martin <storycrafter at gmail dot com> > wrote: >> Create a website and forums to allow the community to reorganize >> itself without the shadow of a hollow and unsupported charter. > > So the OGB would have to violate its own rules and act contrary to > what we were elected for. Again, the OGB would really have to quit > the current system and reform in some other guise, or new people > could start afresh.
Before the community did embark on a community distribution, I think we'd really need to talk things through with Oracle, and perhaps thrash out an agreement. Oracle need to decide if they want to continue releasing the source code, and whether they want to continue releasing the OpenSolaris distribution. Clearly Oracle are gearing up for something RealSoonNow[tm] and my personal feeling is that we're going to be seeing a Solaris Next release candidate in place of OpenSolaris 2010.xx. It remains to be seen what Oracle will then do with OpenSolaris. What we do need is for Oracle to properly engage with the OGB. If/When this happens, we need the OGB to really drive home to Oracle what the community wants. Essentially the OGB needs to *enter negotiations* with Oracle, representing the community, to come to some form of agreement. So right now the community needs to decide what we want. Speaking as a member of the community, my personal view is that the OGB should ask Oracle to commit to continuing to provide access to the source code, but that Oracle should discontinue producing the OpenSolaris distribution and hand this work over to the community. OpenSolaris can become Solaris Next and Oracle can focus on paid Solaris. The community can build a binary compatible distribution that tracks Solaris Next, a la what CentOS is to RHEL. The community can maintain it's own source code repository which can merge in updates from Nexenta/Oracle/etc, and Oracle can pull back the code that interests them. This, to me, makes the most sense. The Community Distribution doesn't compete with Solaris Next, as Larry clearly wants it for their top end systems, especially since Solaris seems to be slowly becoming an Oracle hardware only proprietary OS. The community edition makes perfect sense for non-Oracle hardware and enthusiasts. No doubt a company could form around this providing paid support to those who depend on the community edition. If Oracle do kill off access to the source code, then the community has no choice but to fork, and fork we should. Clearly Nexenta is prepared for this, and they seem to be manoeuvring to announce something next month (see the comments at: http://gdamore.blogspot.com/2010/07/please-be-patient.html ) And, quite honestly, if Oracle do release OpenSolaris 2010.xx, continue providing the source code, and state that they have no intention of stopping publishing future OpenSolaris releases, I think the community should produce their own community version of OpenSolaris regardless. As I've said before, the Oracle/Sun produced distribution does the community a disservice because it stops a community from really forming. This has to happen sooner or later, and very soon seems to be the right time to do it. The community is then partially immune from any future OpenSolaris moves. In a way, Nexenta is already in this position. To quote Garrett D'Amore from his blog post mentioned above: "Nexenta is not wholly dependent upon Oracle source code releases, although right now we track them closely. If that were to stop, then we could continue, but at that point our product and the Oracle code base would necessarily "fork". Obviously, we ("Nexenta" now) prefer to stay in sync with Oracle as much as possible. It would be unfortunate if Oracle's open source code were to vanish, but not utterly catastrophic to us." This is where a community distribution needs to get to. Speaking as Managing Director of EveryCity Managed Hosting in the UK, I can say that I am fully prepared to commit hardware in the way of servers, internet connectivity/bandwidth, zones/xVM guests and potentially staff time or sponsorship to the community. It wouldn't surprise me if other companies such as Joyent would be interested in doing the same - there are no doubt lots of companies out there who have built businesses on OpenSolaris and do not want the hassle of conducting a mass exodus to Linux/NetApp. Alasdair -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
