[ogb-discuss] LDoms Community Proposal redux ...

James Carlson james.d.carlson at sun.com
Wed Aug 8 12:25:21 PDT 2007


Roy T. Fielding writes:
> The OGB goal should be to weed out the dysfunctional CGs and not
> interfere with the functional ones.  In open source, it is even okay
> to have two or more different communities working on the same problem
> space, with competing solutions: this organization does not need to
> be bound by one company's zero-sum resource constraints.

Though I mostly agree with what you've said, I do think it's important
to point out a potential misunderstanding here.

Resource constraints aren't the important issue behind the
architectural concerns over competing solutions.  A more important
issue is with _who_ pays the resulting taxes and has to deal with
chaos.

For example, if there are two deliveries of /usr/bin/ls -- one that's
Solaris and the other that's GNU (for instance) -- do we force every
script writer depending on 'ls' to add compatibility logic to support
both?  If not, then do we end up with a sea of mutually incompatible
things?

Worse still, consider what happens if there's more than one of these
sorts of things.  You end up with a combinatorial explosion.  It's the
consumers of these forked objects that pays the implementation tax,
and not the producer.  It ends up making all projects harder.

Yes, doing things twice does cost more money for someone, but that's
not the only concern, and cost (typically) isn't one of the concerns
that the ARC deals with.  Complexity, though, is.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive         71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax +1 781 442 1677


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