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.
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