On Mon, 03 Sep 2007 18:10:53 -0700 Kent Peacock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Meik Hellmund wrote On 09/03/07 08:12,: > > Just to avoid misunderstandings: > > I - and other Linux people on this list - did not ask Sun to > > waste their time and support dozens of Linux distros. We asked for > > open-sourcing > > it in order to do this (much better as we can to it now) ourselves. > > *That's* the point of open source. > > Of course I also hope that this request will not drive Sun out of business > > -:) > > Open sourcing the large collection of code that comprises the Sun Ray > software product will take quite a bit of resources. (We haven't been > given any extra to do wholesale open sourcing, by the way.) Within the > Sun Ray development group, we have to prioritize what we do based on the > ROI. From my point of view (my opinion, not necessarily my employer's), > the ROI on other things we're working on, like multi-media improvements, > is much higher. At least that's what the customers who actually buy Sun > Rays are telling us. (I can't think of any who say they won't buy Sun > Rays because we don't open source the product.) I would venture to say > (again, my opinion, not that of my employer) that eventually we will > manage to release the Sun Ray source code. It's just going to take time. > > As for a making SRSS run in non-global zones, that is a distinctly > non-trivial task, since we require the ability to do root-privileged > things, like create device nodes and run the X server, which at least > initially runs as root. Again, our resources are deployed on higher > priority tasks. > I am very happy to hear that open-sourcing SRSS is still somewhere on the agenda and not completely ruled out by Sun. I quite understand that you have to prioritize. But that's one of my main questions to Sun: How to you prioritize? What's the roadmap? You are surely right about the majority of your customers (but there are minorities: I also buy quite a number of SunRays for our institution -:). What really surprised me the last few days is that the Solaris aficionados on this list have shown no interest in an open-source SRSS and are stuck in a "We don't need no stinkin' Linux" attitude. I think that with open source products we sysadmins can much better investigate and resolve problems, tweak the software for special application areas or write monitoring software, or generally help to improve the SunRay experience for our users - under Solaris as well as under Linux. Cheers, Meik -- Meik Hellmund Mathematisches Institut, Uni Leipzig e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.math.uni-leipzig.de/~hellmund _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
