[advocacy-discuss] Is opensolaris 100% opensource?

[Laurent Blume]

Shawn Walker a écrit :
> I don't think it really matters though. Again, I attribute this to a
> vocal minority.

More or less. The confusion exists for a majority of people I've met. 
But (as usual) only the vocal minority is heard complaining about their 
own issues, while the others listen and scratch their heads.

> Yes, but the point here was that the components that actually make the
> system "bootstrappable on its own" can be replaced by volunteers.
> 
> I wasn't referring to third-party components that are not necessary
> for the system to function.

Neither the SPARC disassembler nor the ce driver are necessary, so I 
hadn't followed you there, sorry. Thanks for the clarification.

I find your proposition a little disingenuous, though. Why should 
*volunteers* do that? I mean, it's Sun boasting that their OS is 
becoming FOSS. So why reverse the roles, and ask people who say it isn't 
completely free yet to do their work?

The dialog is really becoming something like that:
«Sun: Here, my OS is FOSS, look how good it is!
  FOSS programmer: No, it's not, look there, and there, and there.
  Sun: Oh, yes, sorry. Huh, since you noticed, can you fix it for me? 
For free? Please?»

Even if you were referring to people already part of the OpenSolaris 
Community, I find that it's circular logic. OpenSolaris aims for 
adoption beyond that. You can't expect at the same time that it will be 
adopted because it's FOSS, and will be FOSS because it's adopted.

[snip]
> If you ask Stallman, even if they don't include non-free components in
> the default setup, if they make them easily available by default,
> that's just as bad.
> 
> The FreeBSD project was certainly criticised for it with their ports system.

Okay, agreed, there won't be any full agreement there until the nasty 
non-free bits are shot on sight when they get to close.

> I don't think our adoption is going to be dependent on satisfying a
> "vocal minority."

I do. You might not remember how much it has hurt Sun and Solaris in the 
past, such as when they shipped their Linux Driver Porting Kit, or 
whatever the exact name was. It shouldn't be taken so lightly.
The vocal minority is heard by a second, much larger and more silent 
group around it, and influences it. It'z difficult to judge how big it 
is, but in the aforementioned case, I saw the direct effect on many 
people around me, longtime Linux and FOSS users. It took a while to subside.

And that group is the one we need to reach now: skilled enough to 
understand the advantages of OpenSolaris, and able to use it in spite of 
the many quirks it has that make it still an experimental OS.

> Individuals believe that this issue is important should join the
> Emancipation CG.

We have to reach to them, and not just sit, and hope they'll come by 
themselves. There's still a very strong distrust of Sun hovering around, 
for reasons not entirely rational.
Telling those people «Come and write some man pages to make OpenSolaris 
free!» isn't very attractive.

Even less since than now, because of the confusion I've written about, 
for them, OpenSolaris is now the name of a fully Sun-controlled 
commercial distribution, not a Community Project anymore. Yes, 
contributing really helps the project as a whole, but that's not visible 
from outside it.

> I'd rather spend my time improving packaging, etc.

Yes, sooo much work there. I can't wait to see a remove option in IPS :-)

> It's not going to solve them, but it may help allay some perhaps
> somewhat misguided concerns.

Yes. Transparency, the basis of the OpenSolaris Project, will always be 
a Good Thing.

Laurent
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