Looking For Evidence
Posted by Stuart Herbert @ 5:30 PM, Sat 07 May 05
Filed under: Gentoo
1 Comment
I was intrigued by Ciaran’s recent post on Planet Gentoo that he’s been told by devrel that he’s not allowed to say that Pathspec is vapourware, or that we don’t have an active OpenSolaris port.
Unfortunately, a recent power outage hosed my local mailhub (I’d forgotten it still used reiserfs; not any more it doesn’t!!), so I can’t send emails to all involved to ask questions directly. But I shouldn’t need to. The Free Software and Open Source community was built on the idea of that the code is king. If you can’t show me the code, then it either doesn’t exist, or it’s not our idea of “open”.
I went looking for code, and here’s what I found.
One Comment
May 8th, 2005 at 10:39 pm
Thanks for the feedback. It’s kind of you to take the time to read what I’ve written.
There’s quite a contrast between Gentoo/OpenSolaris and Gentoo/FreeBSD. There’s evidence for Gentoo/FreeBSD in the Portage tree. There’s an appropriate entry in arch.list. There are keyworded packages. And there are Gentoo/FreeBSD devs actively participating in the Gentoo community.
I worked with Sun on a successful opensource project in the mid-90’s. I have nothing but good things to say about that experience. I believe that OpenSolaris is real, and that it will be released when Sun are ready to release it.
My personal belief is that Gentoo/OpenSolaris does exist, and that it’s being developed away from the main Portage tree. I hope I’m wrong, because I don’t like being part of a community which believes that’s appropriate behaviour. You can’t have an open product being produced by a closed community. A product is open precisely because the community is open. Licenses don’t make products open; it’s people that do.
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