I hadn’t thought about this post in a long time… Thanks for the reminder.

Hahahahaha….

He set the OpenSolaris community asunder. He caused the OpenSolaris and Indiana fiasco.

Just one thought about MySQL. The development model of it has evolved over the years. It began as a couple of individuals who put it together. Many early big features, like Windows or Replication, were put together or paid for by individuals in the community.

MySQL is “Organic” open source though. It has never been a closed source product. It is difficult, though not impossible, to take closed source and take it in the direction of open source. It took Mozilla a long time to become a Firefox.

I know that Monty, David, and I believe that we need to find a way to open up the development model of MySQL. We have recognized for the last few years that this is one of our weakness as a project.

Cheers,
-Brian

It is therefore hilarious to me, as it should be to all, that Sun calls itself an open source company. They have not got the foggiest clue, and this is all the more evident each 8-14 month period when I load a newer version of Ubuntu on the old box.

Linux improves because of trust. Period.

I think you and I are talking to completely different levels of scope in this discussion. I’m taking it far broader from a strategy POV and while you’re talking about incremental progress within the project, and while that may be ok for today…. Sun Tzu would say Sun has built a strategy that has already lost the war.

It seems that what you’re saying is that we shouldn’t have even attempted to open up Solaris, except perhaps to have thrown the code over the wall and let other projects pick over the remains. And if OpenSolaris was simply a nice collection of otherwise distinct technologies, I could almost see that point. However it’s not that but rather a much more cohesive thing which is why we believed at the time (and continue to believe) that it’s worth having a community around it.

Roy Fielding’s departure is unfortunate and I wish that we had his perspective as we move forward. That said, what I do know is there are a lot of passionate people about the technology, both within and outside of Sun, and the OpenSolaris community is a place for them to interact. And call me naive or hopelessly optimistic, but I do believe in the coming months that you will see the Mercurial repository outside the firewall and that more and more of the various processes that are currently awkwardly transitioning between being inside Sun and going outside will be more firmly outside.

I’m talking about a fundamental difference and approach that will not work for OpenSolaris – I’ve said it many times before and Sun is only proving my point. If Jonathan wanted XYZ to happen, he has the control to make it happen.

And I have to disagree with you on the license actually. I don’t believe there would be any difference if Sun had used the GPL for OpenSolaris. It’s not that easy to just mix/mash the codebases.

I know plenty about OpenSolaris. There was a time when I thought Sun was really going to open up and turn around. Then I peeked enough to find out the details. I suggest everyone start taking a critical eye to the nonsense I heard coming out of Sun executives’ mouths – take them to task on it and start to really ask the right questions. I’ll bet you don’t get a good answer.

Trademarks in this example are a very simple, known entity to work with. Sun is not blazing new ground having an open source project that it owns a trademark. Just ask anyone at DLA Piper down the road, and this trademark BS would be resolved in a couple weeks. Perhaps some should question if that’s really what Sun wants (I think Roy figured it out).