Linda, With all due respect, those of us who are interested in this project and who do not work at Sun do not have access to the in-person meetings and are only able to follow and participate in conversations if they are held in public forums such as this mailing list. Furthermore, while the transcripts of such meetings or good summaries of such meeting might subsequently be made available, the non-Sun community would just be a passive listener rather than an active participant, unable to voice opinions and concerns during such meetings.
It is with great trepidation that I feel Sun is trying to assert its command-and-control mechanisms on a supposedly open community, and I also feel that Alan might have offended some higher-ups and is now going to get a no-so-gentle grilling to the tune of "don't forget who writes your paycheck." I would like to say to that that as far as I am concerned, Alan has done a fantastic job on OpenSolaris and deserves to be treated with respect as both a seasoned professional in his field as well as a sorely needed instrument of change in Sun's OpenSolaris community-building efforts. I understand that some things are best dealt in person, and I especially understand how companies feel that heated arguments are best held behind closed doors. I would just point out that in general open-source people, geographically spread as they are, do not have the luxury of meeting behind closed doors but rather have developed protocols to have such discussions in the open, in publicly available and google-searched mailing lists and forums, and have successfully done so for many years with very good results. The Sun employees who participate in and maintain these public mailing lists and forums have done a tremendous job learning from and applying these informal protocols and have, as a result, been able to engage a wide variety of non-Sun people in discussions relating to OpenSolaris. It is my wish that you would be considerate of these efforts and results and keep the community involved rather than take a supposedly "open" process behind corporate doors. Sincerely, Christopher Mahan On 7/12/07, Fellingham Linda <Linda.Fellingham at sun.com> wrote: > > Alan, > > I think this is probably a discussion that needs to happen on other > than just email exchanges. I've asked Ron B. to set up a meeting to > discuss X and OpenGL futures at a higher level. > > Thanks, > Linda > > On Jul 11, 2007, at 4:34 PM, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > > > Alan Coopersmith wrote: > >> from a > >> pure resource management perspective, it would seem the best > >> solution is > >> to remove your team's OpenGL from Solaris altogether and ship Mesa > >> on both > >> platforms. This would also give customers the same OpenGL > >> interfaces on > >> both platforms, though without hardware acceleration on SPARC, > >> much as x86 > >> users have had to suffer through for years, and would allow us to > >> ship the > >> open source OpenGL on both platforms for Indiana instead of > >> relying on your > >> closed source solution. > > > > After thinking about this some more, it may just be the best answer > > all > > around for Nevada & Indiana (but not Solaris 10) - since those will > > ship > > only with Xorg, not Xsun, and SPARC graphics has only enough resources > > committed to Xorg to provide drivers for XVR-100, XVR-300, and > > XVR-2500, > > and of those only XVR-2500 has OpenGL hardware acceleration, moving to > > Mesa/DRI for Nevada/Indiana will give *more* customers hardware > > acceleration > > than sticking with the current OpenGL - we'll be able to leverage > > the existing > > ATI Radeon Mesa/DRI drivers that the x86 team has ported to Solaris > > already > > and give XVR-100 & XVR-300 users hardware acceleration that they > > don't have > > today, and your team will be able to port the existing XVR-2500 > > driver (which > > was originally written for Mesa/DRI, and even with Xsun I'm told > > still uses > > DRI under the hood). It will also make it possible for IHV's like > > Tadpole > > who want to provide hardware acceleration for OpenGL on their SPARC > > platforms > > to be able to do so, which will bring hardware acceleration to another > > batch of users who can't have it with the current SPARC OpenGL. > > > > We'll have to resolve the client library ABI issues around the > > proprietary > > Sun OpenGL ABI, but that may be a smaller problem than trying to > > shoehorn > > the old code into the new world and keep it up to date. > > > > -- > > -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com > > Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering > > > > _______________________________________________ > indiana-discuss mailing list > indiana-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss > -- Chris Mahan http://www.christophermahan.com/ chris_mahan at yahoo.com chris.mahan at gmail.com cell 818.943.1850 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/xwin-discuss/attachments/20070712/225c11a2/attachment.html>
