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[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "ac" == Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM> writes:

    >>> We'd like to go with an open source solution, yes.

    >>  Which is pretty ironic, since the entire hosting setup and app
    >> space for OpenSolaris.org is set up such that only certain Sun
    >> employees can get developer or admin level access to any of the
    >> stuff...

    >> What good is it to have open source if the community members
    >> can't actually do anything with it?

    ac> That's like complaining that it's no good to have the OS code
    ac> open source since only certain Sun employees can actually do
    ac> putbacks or build the official build packages/images.  

yeah, good point!

With most other free software communities, all the tools are available
for contributors to produce the final distributable image on their
own.  The peppering of proprietary software and the closed part of the
build process makes this impossible with SXCE/Indiana, unless I'm
confused again.  The proprietary choke-point at this spot in the
development cycle also makes community maintenance of a stable branch
impossible---you can only collaborate on the development branch if you
want to work through Sun's web page because the stable branch is all
closed-source.

It may be ironic to prefer free web tools but I still don't think it's
entirely silly: if all the software used to maintain the web presence
were free software like Trac or something, and if all the
opensolaris.org-web-site patches to said software were available to
the community (which is generally more than the license requires since
you aren't distributing the software just to run it on your web page),
then it'd become one step easier for a community to form around a
different web site, one that has different policies than Sun can
allow, like ``we want an open-source stable branch'' or ``we will not
track bugs for any customer that won't make the bug info public'' or
whatever other policy people find important.

Ultimately I think Sun's contribution is too big for such
forks/distributions to survive, and the forks/other-distributions
themselves might not be desireable, but those two beliefs of mine are
obviously not shared by everyone since other distributions,
repositories, and project sites exist right now.

Making forks easy in practice is just about the most important thing
any project can do to keep its governance fair.  It takes a tiny leap
of logic to understand why it's important to make something easy to do
even though we don't want it to happen, but, with a few loud
exceptions, I think most people are capable of thinking their way over
that puddle.  so, just like accomodating other distributions than
Indiana (with altered binary licensing and free publicity) is
important, using open tools for the web site makes sense to me too.

The important point I take from the OP is that it's not enough just to
use open tools, because just to use them on a web site the tools'
license (except for Affero u.s.w.) won't actually compell openness.
You'll have to voluntarily share fixes and changes to the web tools.
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