The reason to move to OpenSolaris 2956

Alan Coopersmith ... Really? You mean paid by Sun to do the wheel support.. not simply doing it because it was needed and Sun wasn't interested... right?

Yes. My paycheck from Sun was deposited into my bank account when I did that just as it is every two weeks. (I did the Xsun side, the USB driver guys did the kernel driver side. We both had it as an official buttigned task as part of our jobs.) There were other implementations from non-Sun employees released first, but we did it too.

There were barriers we had to overcome that made it much later than it should have been, but many of those have been brought down to make it easier to get work like this done and we are trying to be able to be more responsive.

For instance, last week I integrated the Xorg 6.8.2 release into the Solaris development branch within 24 hours of the open source release. Of course, this was possible because we'd been tracking and importing each of the release candidates, so the final set of changes was just the release number bumping, documentation changes, and handful of last minute critical fixes that went in after the last RC. Sun's QA processes will now beat on it for a while before you see it officially released in a few months.

-- Working for, but definitely not speaking for, Sun Microsystems, Inc.