Presuming this is authentic, and not a hoax...hmm. * Arrogance level: high * Business justification: yes, if one neglects the negative response * Practical impact: unclear
Most new projects already got pretty far along behind the firewall before the rest of us could see them. This sounds as if it would delay that further. How much further, I'm not sure. The key seems to be the sentence "We will distribute updates...following full releases...", and the possibility of exceptions as desirable noted later. That would be a narrow tightrope to walk on some of the licenses, IMO, if it meant that less than "full release" binary updates could be released without making the corresponding updates to open source available at the same time. And even where it _could_ be done, it might be counterproductive in a strictly practical sense, insofar as troubleshooting (esp. with DTrace) is greatly facilitated by having as much as possible of the matching source as available as the corresponding binaries. Not to mention that outside early feedback on open ARC cases sometimes has contributed useful ideas that were incorporated. Other than that...the same level (but _not_ current-ness) of source availability is implied. Some sort of reasonably open early access to pre-beta binaries for familiarization and application or 3rd party driver developers would apparently still be there, if not as timely. Arrogance (and the complementarity of source access and DTrace) aside, I think this makes one other fundamental mistake: FUD does not exist primarily because competitors have the lead time to polish their FUD. It exists because of the _absence_ of authoritative information creates a vacuum, which will inevitably be filled with pessimistic speculation. Provocateurs are cheap negative advertising, and they thrive in the absence of facts. So again...assuming this to be accurate, I'm quite disappointed, but not appalled. Aside from causing independent distros to play catch-up in bigger chunks, it seems to me that this does more harm to Solaris (and thus ultimately to Oracle) than it does to those that seek to profit from it independent of Oracle. Reasonable use of discretion in the direction of flexibility, where it does not give away major competitive advantage, would do much to mitigate the adverse impacts... -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
