[jpeeler]

> ...But then we'd be at the mercy of upstream of accepting patches,

This point bothers me, but I can't say with confidence that it's completely wrong. I know there are occasional rifts within the open source world, but I wish I knew two things:

1) How much overhead (in totality) is there when contributing to a project you don't control?

2) How different is the end result of collaboration between distinct groups or individuals versus doing things separately?

[steveklabnik]

It depends on the project, and we do contribute upstream to other things all the time.

My comment wasn't so much about the overhead of collaboration, but of the chance of there being significant differences in opinion, leading to a place where we'd basically have to fork anyway. Remember, in this specific context, we're talking about an operating system and hypervisor that are core to our product, and we're building our own hardware.

You can't get one single answer for these questions for the entirety of the open source community. Even cross-language norms can be different. These things are inherently tradeoffs.

[sunshowers]

I wasn't part of making the decision to use illumos, but having an extensive history of open source contributions I'm confident it is the right one (at least on this axis).