[Xorp-hackers] Recent developments and patch submission

[Bruce Simpson]

Ben,

With all due respect, I think the point is that it always has been, or 
at least, that has always been the intention, that the body of code, 
currently known as XORP, remain open source.

On 03/06/10 16:39, Ben Greear wrote:
> ...
> Especially with the demise of Xorp.inc, this is now an open-source 
> project
> or nothing at all.  If you can't get patches actively accepted or bug 
> reports
> actively debugged, then no developer or user is going to stay active for
> long.

I can't apologise enough for what has happened with XORP, Inc., even 
though it was neither my decision nor my responsibility. Ultimately, 
private investor's money, and a degree of credibility, has been lost.

Unfortunately, this does affect the sustainability of any effort which 
follows. It is going to make it more difficult to attract investment on 
a commercial basis -- word gets around.

I think I speak for the original instigators when I say that it was our 
shared hope that introducing a healthy commercial interest would 
vitalize development. Again, unfortunately, this hasn't happened, due to 
circumstances beyond my control.

Having said all this, basic ground rules do need to be followed. It just 
makes life much easier for collaborative development if patches intended 
for submission go in an issue tracker.

>
> So, unless you specifically ask me to stop posting to this list, I'm 
> going to continue to try
> to accept patches that fix problems into my tree, even if they are not
> perfect, and I'm going to continue to talk about it on the mailing list.

Anyone is free to re-use the XORP source code as per the terms of its 
license.

However, solving more general issues with piecemeal patches in the here 
and now, is going to take more effort and thought.

It is regrettable that your requirements for virtualization weren't part 
of the development roadmap. Had they been, and had we had a better 
platform for collaborative development from the outset, then there might 
not be the wide gap that exists between your private git tree, and SVN, now.

>
> I'm using git for my source control, so it's trivial to view/extract 
> each patch
> that goes in later should anyone ever want to accept it upstream.

I would argue that the use of git may make code sharing trivial for 
those who use git and are familiar with it, but probably not for the 
majority of the open source user base.

Even for developers, hosting code separately from a main line of 
development makes things that much more difficult, even if they use the 
same source-code control technology.

It would be fair to say that there's infinite demand for free goods. 
Unfortunately, sanity needs to prevail -- open source is a work product, 
not a free lunch.

regards,
BMS