CSW packaging for Solaris, was started by Philip Brown in 2002, as an effort to offer binary packages to the Solaris community, that had dependancies, and bugtracking, similar to the way that Debian Linux offered linux packages. He had already written "pkg-get", a work-alike to the debian "apt-get", originally targetted for sunfreeware.com packages. Unfortunately, the owner of sunfreeware.com decided against including enhancements such as package dependancies in his packages, so Phil eventually decided to start up a more comprehensive set of packages.
Phil's initial effort was to create a set of 100 or so packages he made public on ibiblio.org. After that was completed, he decided to take things to a larger scale.
Earlier packages he had built, were based on top of sun's "Companion CD" packages, but that proved to be inadequately up to date for what many people required to run modern free software. This meant that it was neccessary to entirely replace, rather than augment, the software provided by sun's CCD packages, which required a greater number of people to help.
So, on Oct 11, 2002,
Philip Brown made a post on comp.unix.solaris, requesting use of a public
"build machine" for his project, as a resource for people who wished
to join him building packages.
Dennis Clarke offered use of some machines, as well use of his
"blastwave.org" domain that had "not ever been used for much".
Thus, the CSW project got settled in "at blastwave", with Philip Brown as the "project leader", release manager, and overseer of the standards for the CSW project. Over the years, various people signed up to be package maintainers, and the list of packages grew to thousands, with Phil running the packaging side of things, while Dennis provided the hardware, bandwidth, and domain name.
...
On April 23 2008, Dennis Clarke announced to the maintainers list, "A time to fork".
"For those that are interested in working on a pure Solaris 10 build environment with the more up to date and *mature* technology for the greater benefit of the Solaris user world then I ask you to stand up and be counted now. We can work out the details later but I have laid the broad brush strokes. It is time to fork."This was the latest in a long repeated history of him trying to get the CSW project to drop Solaris 8 support.
Based on that, Phil contacted the CEO of Sun, in an attempt to find
solaris 8 build machines that were not potentially in danger of
going away.
Sun decided to contact Dennis, and asked him to "fix things". Dennis's
response, was to lock Phil Brown out of the machines that Dennis controlled.
Without any discussion with maintainers. The maintainers generally
responded very negatively to Dennis's actions.
On May 22 2008, Dennis Clarke announced on the mailing list,
"Anyone that wants to work with Philip Brown and continue with Solaris 8 based everything please speak up. I have no further interest in an operating system that is eight years old, closed source completely, and no longer shipping or even supported unless you throw a pile of money at it. You may feel differently.Enough people did "speak up", so that Dennis reinstated Phil's account on blastwave.org machines a day or two after.So people need to make choices and speak up."
On May 24 2008, Dennis emailed the maintainer list a message, stating that he agreed to let people who still wished to work on solaris 8 compatible packages, continue our work unhindered by him, and use the "csw.blastwave.org" subdomain. He would move forward on his own separate packaging project, focused on Solaris 10 and above. Thus, a significant chunk of remaining active maintainers, chose to start work on csw.blastwave.org at that time.
On Aug 1 2008, Dennis Clarke announced to a select group of "key people", that he had filed "blastwave" as a registered trademark of "Blastwave.org Inc", and further announced that he intended "blastwave.org" to become more commercially focused, as it pertained to business use of CSW packages. He also announced that the project had been "legally changed".
Even amoung these "key people", the ones who were actual package maintainers objected to his stated plans, particularly as he did not discuss with them this strategy beforehand.
On August 6 2008, Dennis was asked to leave the "CSW" maintainers list, as he had previously agreed to, to let CSW maintainers focus on building Solaris 8 compatible packages without disruption from him. He unsubscribed one of his email addresses at that time. Then, the new csw.blastwave.org website then was announced to the csw maintainers.
When he heard news of it, and then saw for himself how far it was functional without his own hardware (previously, he made assumptions we were going to use hardware controlled by him), Dennis Clarke then said that we could not use "the blastwave name" in anything we do. In direct contradiction to his previous word, that we could use csw.blastwave.org without interference from him.
Dennis then also chose to shut down core "blastwave.org" infrastructure himself, taking down the main www.blastwave.org webserver, and removing the DNS record that allowed csw.blastwave.org to function using that name. While some machines were previously down/non-reachable, due to him doing some maintainance and upgrades on them, he chose to disable/take down everything else that he controlled, at that point.
Dennis also deliberately deleted our master archive of CSW packages, on the machine functioning as the rsync master for CSW package mirror sites (a machine which was not owned by him to start with). This resulted in all master mirror sites losing CSW packages for a while, until we could hunt down a backup site to restore from.
At that point, maintainers who were still committed to our goals of "free binary packages for current production solaris (including Solaris 8)" started to work on a new virtual home for CSW packaging. The new home is now called "opencsw.org"