[ogb-discuss] [opensolaris-summit] My comments (very subjective) on proposed Summit topics

[Stephen Lau]

Darren Reed wrote:
> Keith M Wesolowski wrote:
> 
>> ...
>> It's not bureaucracy (why does everyone think there's so much of it?
>> Do you know what the word actually means?) but a lack of adequate
>> infrastructure that makes contributing such a pain.  I blame Sun for
>> this; its insistence on maintaining control of the infrastructure and
>> its tortuous legal and policy constraints are a main reason more
>> progress has not been made.  That said, anyone could put together a
>> proposal to move all this outside Sun's control and accelerate the
>> process, yet no one has.  It's unclear whether that's because of
>> laziness, lack of interest, or lack of means.
>>  
>>
> 
> There are a number of things that need to happen here and
> they've been raised before (at least by myself):
> 
> 1) move the opensolaris machinery (web server, repository,
>    etc) away from being owned by Sun;

While this is a noteworthy long-term goal, I fail to see what problems 
this solves in the short-term.

Who will own them?  Who will maintain them?  Who will be paid to 
maintain them?

> 2) to achieve (1), create an opensolaris entity that can own
>    pieces of hardware, etc;
> 3) in order to fund both (1) and (2), make an opensolaris
>    entity that is a non profit organisation.

okay, that answers my questions from #1... but...

> If we were a true bona-fide opensource project and with a bit
> of luck, we can get a server into a back-bone ISP's colocation
> facility using 1RU or less of space.

There are plenty of open source projects who succeed massively without 
the need for non-profit foundations.

> To what extent Sun is required to cooperate here, I don't know.
> 
> But, now that OpenSolaris is open, if there were enough interested
> parties we could build a new distribution that we all worked on
> (with a new name) with the model *we* want and just leave
> OpenSolaris in Sun's hands.  We can still pull in code from OS.o,
> after it gets mirrored there from nevada.
> 
> Heck, maybe we participants should just do that anyway, rather
> than wait for Sun to work out what it wants to do with OS.o?

That's certainly a prerogative that anyone has... after all, the code is 
open.

cheers,
steve
-- 
stephen lau // stevel at sun.com | 650.786.0845 | http://whacked.net
opensolaris // solaris kernel development