[ewg] [ANNOUNCE] OFED 4.8-rc2 release is available

[Hefty, Sean]

> > OFED is a software product of OFA, not Linux.  OFA can put anything
> > that they want in it.  Why do you even care?  It's no different than
> > Intel or Mellanox or any other company shipping out of tree
> > software.
> 
> The primary answer to your question depends on whether or not the
> software will ever be upstreamed.  If it will, then it really should
> go
> there first and not later, and the reason is well exemplified by what
> happened with XRC where the version that landed in OFED and the
> version
> that landed in upstream were two totally different things, and users
> had
> to go back and fix up all their code because of the difference once it
> finally did land upstream.  It's not nice to put users in that
> position
> again, and this does sound like it might end up going down that exact
> road since upstream is pursuing ways of doing peer to peer PCI
> operations and such without any input from the Xeon Phi folks.

I'm not defending whatever business decisions any organization (including a multi-company non-profit like OFA) wants to make wrt their software distributions.  I'm claiming that that's their decision.