[openfabrics-ewg] Re: How to generate IBEDreleasesusing 1.0branch

[Roland Dreier]

    Matt>   RedHat and SuSE have already said they will need to depend
    Matt> upon the IB community to harden the stack into something
    Matt> that is production ready.  So are you suggesting that we go
    Matt> back to letting each company do their own version of
    Matt> OpenFabrics?  Then we go back to the days of having X IB
    Matt> stacks each with different features.  I can hear the sales
    Matt> folks now "By our equipment because we have a better IB
    Matt> stack".  That idea almost killed IB once, and it could kill
    Matt> it again.

No, and in fact that is exactly what IBED addresses by getting all the
vendors that will actually sell and support the distribution onto a
single distro.  But expecting OpenFabrics to integrate OpenFabrics
software, kernel releases, MPI stacks, etc., then package it up in an
easy-to-install way for all the distributions / architectures
customers want, and then forcing vendors to support that pile seems
outside the scope of a free software project.

And forbidding people from creating distributions of OF software in a
way they feel adds value seems wrong to me.  OF should build the
platform, and let the vendors build products to meet what they feel is
what the market wants.

 - R.