One week of infrastructure issues [LWN.net]

One week of infrastructure issues

Posted Aug 21, 2008 23:06 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

"Sun Microsystems opened the very proprietary Solaris in far less time. "

Sun opened up its build infrastructure they use to actually build the versions of OpenSolaris
that they provide in binary form? I think you are confused between offering an open source
codebase.. and building an open community infrastructure. They are not the same things and
one is easier to do than the other.

Now I may be wrong, but it seems to me that opensolaris development is gated through Sun
developers.
These pages would certainly suggest it works like that:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/communities/participation/
http://opensolaris.org/os/bug_reports/request_sponsor/

If you want to contribute fixes or enhancements to OpenSolaris you file bugs or RFE's in the
opensolaris bug tracker and those patches are reviewed by Sun employees for integration. In
fact you actually have to sign over joint copyright ownership to Sun for any contributions you
make..before you are allowed to contribute anything.

You want to contribute, you send in a patch...it gets reviewed, the Sun employee applies it
for you. Actually its more complicated than that.. you actually have to request a Sun employee
sponsor you and give you the go ahead to actually work on a patch.

Besides the whole, must give Sun joint copyright detail and the whole you must request a
sponsor detail, the basic mechanism by which non-Sun employeed contributors can contribute to
OpenSolaris compares directly to community participated in Fedora before the Core/Extras
merge...as far back as RHL 6.x if not prior to that. But I only speak of history that I have
personally lived so I won't speak to anything before RHL 6.x.

If filing bugs and patches in a bug tracker is bar you want open source distributions to
meet... RHL met that a long long time ago. With Fedora as of Fedora 7, community involvement
goes well beyond that, with community members having equal access to actually commit code for
the entire infrastructure which builds the distribution. But we've even moved beyond that
now. Now, there are community members shoulder to shoulder with redhat employees as part of
the infrastructure and release engineering teams. Community members aren't just contributing
the bits... community members are responsible for grinding the bits and cranking out the
sausage every six months. At every level where responsibility can be shared inside Fedora, Red
Hat shares it with community members... because its a partnership. What other software
company is making that level of commitment that Red Hat is making to work with community as a
development partner?

-jef

Outside of Debian, what other linux distribution gives that much access to

One week of infrastructure issues

Posted Aug 22, 2008 0:06 UTC (Fri) by gman (subscriber, #40493) [Link]

While that process has certainly been true of the past, things are progressing. OpenSolaris has now had a successful migration from Teamware to Mercurial internally, and the next phase is to push that gate outside the firewall. Once this happens, people will be able to commit directly to the kernel (though, much of the review process will still be in place). The bug tracker is still internal (due to confidentiality issues), though we now have a bugzilla instance (defect.opensolaris.org) that many project groups are using.

There is obviously still a significant amount of work to be where we want to be.

One week of infrastructure issues

Posted Aug 22, 2008 2:54 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Yes opening up infrastructure and and shaking up an existing established workflow inside a
company fence line takes time and non-trivial effort.  Both from an engineering standpoint and
from a legal standpoint.  If doing that work is OpenSolaris's intentions then I applaud the
effort and I look forward to each of the incremental steps as  they take place.  Its hard work
clearing internal company hurdles to make those incremental steps happen.  

Just what ever you do, don't reach for or build a new set of proprietary tools to form the
basis of your community infrastructure and community contribution process.  Don't build your
own launchpad.  If you can avoid that trap, and take advantage of existing open tech or if you
have to build your own open tech... it will pay off when your community wants to help adjust
the community facing tools, because they'll be able to step in and do it for themselves. 

Human code review isn't the issue, someone will always have to be the final say on some issue
and for something like the kernel that person should be someone who is deeply invovled in its
development. Not going to get any arguments from me there.  Cultivating deeply technical
community contribution is a process in itself. It starts with code access, and then it grows
via development process participation, and then in culminates in development process
leadership in new areas...areas your company didn't really think about at the beginning of the
process of opening up. 

-jef

One week of infrastructure issues

Posted Aug 23, 2008 21:05 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

"""
Sun opened up its build infrastructure they use to actually build the versions of OpenSolaris that they provide in binary form?
"""

No. I was responding to motk's statement:

"It took a lot of time and effort for the ISIT team to build out infrastructure to bootstrap everything, for Legal to ensure that nothing lurked in there that could either bite RH or encumber the nascent Fedora project"

You might recognize that as the stock argument for why it takes so long to open large bodies of closed source code. In response, I pointed out that Sun managed to open a gigantic and completely closed code base (with a long history), in far less time than it took Fedora/Redhat to open up the supposedly 100% open-source build infrastructure of a 100% open-source project for public use. Different goals, yes. But opening Solaris was at least an order of magnitude more ambitious than what took Fedora so very, very long to accomplish.

It's hard to believe that people whom I know *must* be familiar with the situation are actually trying to deny the obvious and major foot-dragging that occurred for years.

One week of infrastructure issues

Posted Aug 24, 2008 1:04 UTC (Sun) by motk (subscriber, #51120) [Link]

Thanks for implying that I'm a liar. I really appreciate your contributions to the public FOSS discourse.

One week of infrastructure issues

Posted Aug 24, 2008 4:20 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

"""
Thanks for implying that I'm a liar.
"""

motk,

What do you mean by that? I disagreed with your argument, but never intended to imply that you were a liar. I do perceive some general desire by some to sweep certain things under the rug at this late date, when the evidence is not still hanging in everyone's faces. But that's a different thing.

All's well that ends well. But that does not mean that all was always well. Best to admit past mistakes and go on, I think...

One week of infrastructure issues

Posted Aug 24, 2008 18:22 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"I pointed out that Sun managed to open a gigantic and completely closed code base (with a long history), in far less time than it took Fedora/Redhat to open up the supposedly 100% open-source build infrastructure of a 100% open-source project for public use."

It wasn't open build infrastructure at all before and what was used internally was completely unusable outside of Red Hat. It had to be written from scratch before it was used for Fedora as I have already indicated earlier. It wasn't 100% open source either. That's just two of the several things you have got wrong in this discussion. This discussion seems completely unrelated to the article at this point even if it was tangentially related earlier and If you got more questions, feel free to email me and I will happy to tell you all about it.