[okl4-developer] How can Minix 3 be so small

[Ben Leslie]

On Wed Jun 27, 2007 at 12:45:39 +0200, Martin Christian wrote:
>Hi!
> 
>> As for Minix3, it grows fast since last year due to good organization
>> and open strategy that attracts open-source programmers. And I think
>> maybe one day, it will become more influential than L4 if things
>> progress as now.
>That's a good point! I was also wondering what OKLs understanding of
>Open Source is? More precisly these are my questions:
>
>1.) Why is OKL4 developed in a closed source repository? It would add
>much more confidence over OKLs commitment to Open Source if they used an
>open repository like the Linux kernel does.

Some of our work is subject to NDAs which have been signed with the
relevant clients. As such this work cannot be made public and we
cannot even 'talk around' the work being done. We therefore made the
conservative decision to not make our repositories open to the public
but instead to release the publicly releasable code in the form of a
tarball that we can verify contains nothing that would put us in
breach of any NDA. We feel it is appropriate to take our customers'
privacy concerns very seriously. At the same time, we also want to
keep our code open for use by the community. The solution we have
arrived at allows us to keep the released source very much 'open'.

As a historical note, Linux development proceeded some years without a
publicly available repository. In fact, until he started using
bitkeeper, Linus refused to use source control and instead applied
patches by hand to his tree, with backups made by people mirroring his
ftp server. :-)

>2.) What about adding new architectures to OKL4? Assuming I had writen a
>port of OKL4 to some new architecture - say AVR32 as it was propsed some
>time ago - would there be a chance to get it integrated into the OKL4
>release?

We would certainly considering merging a port to a new
architecture. We would have the same conditions as _every_ other open
source project out there:

1) The code meets the project's quality standards.
2) The code is released under an appropriate license that allows
us to integrate with the rest of our code base.
3) The person who releases the code to us has the right to do so. (E.g:
because they wrote it and own the copyright).

Every single open source project out there would have the same
conditions before accepting code.

In fact we'd _love_ to see your port for the sheer fun of seeing how you
solved the various issues that crop up.

>And one other thing might help: Start a flamewar with Tannenbaum to draw
>more attention on OKL4. ;-)

Maybe :) We are quite happy with how Minix is going and think there is
enough room for both of us out there in the development community. In 
fact there have been thesis topics at UNSW about reusing Minix compononent
on top of OKL4[1]. It seems that there has also been other interest
in this in the past such as the L4/Minix project[2], although this was
based on Minix 2, not Minix 3.

Cheers,

Ben

[1] http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/db/thesis/topicinfo/KJE13.html
[2] http://research.nii.ac.jp/~kazuya/L4.Minix/