[OpenIndiana-discuss] Martin Bochnig

[Ivar Janmaat]

Hello Andrew,

I know Firefox is not part of Illumos. The discussion was about 
contributing to Illumos in different roles.

I am not talking about enduser support. Illumos mentions distros, 
partners and sponser on their website. These are business to business 
relations. Agreements if you like about, communication, use of logo's, 
resource use, whatever. Probably agreements on how to work together in 
an effective and efficient way.

You say that Illumos will put limitations on distro's business model but 
you only mention the license condition. Are there more or is it only the 
license? Just to be clear.

I don't feel it is helpful to go in to different business models if that 
is not needed for this discussion. This is about managing expectations 
and some mediation but lets try to get things clear first.

Kind regards,

Ivar Janmaat


Andrew Gabriel schreef:
> On 15/04/2015 22:23, Ivar Janmaat wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> In my humble opinion there are several questions which Illumos might 
>> want to answer because they are relevant to others as well.
>
> I supply some answers, but I suspect you are thinking Firefox is part 
> of illumos, but it is not, so these questions/answers are not relevant 
> to Firefox.
>
>> 1. Which support levels and services can a distro, distro developer, 
>> partner or sponsor expect from Illumos?
>
> *Expect*? - none direct from Illumos.
> Support is contributed to Illumos by (for the most part) the consumers 
> of illumos, i.e. the distros, and other interested individuals.
>
> People looking for supported solutions need to go to one of the 
> distros which provides support, such as OmniTI, Nexenta, Delphix, 
> Joyent, etc. and check out what's required to get support coverage.
>
>> I believe answering this question in a transparent manner on the 
>> website would be beneficial for all distro providers. It would be the 
>> basis of trust and a equal playing field. A distro developer might be 
>> a single person who can add code to Illumos while working for Illumos 
>> distro partner so these roles might be different.
>> 2. Is distributing binaries of opensource code with distro specific 
>> patches or configurations in the sourcecode and not providing the 
>> this source code in violation with the Illumos licensing model?
>
> Illumos is only source code. Binaries are created by the individual 
> distros.
> (There were some expections for the closed source binaries supplied by 
> Sun, but these are mostly now replaced with opensource. The aim is to 
> have no binaries in Illumos.)
>
> You need to check the license which applies to each of the source 
> files you use. Some will allow you to modify+distribute and keep the 
> changes private (such as the Mozilla public license, I think), others 
> will not (such as CDDL, I think).
>
>> 3. Will Illumos put limitations on a distros business model when 
>> using Illumos sourcecode?
>
> Yes, as covered by the various licenses in each part of the source 
> code (mostly but not exclusively CDDL).
>
>> I try to structure this discussion so we can move forward.
>
> As Firefox is not part of Illumos, I don't think these answers will 
> help at all for that purpose.
>
> It is up to each distro if they ship Firefox at all (not all do), and 
> if so, which Firefox they ship. I can't imagine any distro shipping a 
> closed source Firefox binary. They all build all the items they ship 
> from source, to ensure they have a completely compatible set of 
> parts/versions, and to ensure that other people can take over if one 
> person doesn't continue building an item for any reason.
>
> What Martin could do if he wants to ship his binary for OpenIndiana is 
> to setup an IPS repo with it in, which people can pull in to their own 
> installations if they want to, and/or a simple tar-file package which 
> could be used on other distros. That leaves the choice to the 
> end-user, which is where is has to be for a binary built and 
> maintained by just one person with no sources or build instructions 
> available publically.
>
> He hints that he wants to make money from his firefox builds, but I 
> doubt that's viable. The market for the product is too small and in 
> the desktop space comprises mostly people who want to run free 
> opensource software, which doesn't match what Martin is offering. It 
> would only be viable if there was a company which wanted to launch a 
> product based on an open Solaris desktop that needed Firefox, and they 
> were willing to pay for support, but no company would ever do that 
> based on a 1-man support organisation - support needs to be provided 
> by enough people that loss of some of them doesn't risk the business 
> venture.
>