Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Ted Ts’o Dissects “What Sun was trying to do with OpenSolaris”
Ted put together a great set of insights into what Sun may have been up to with OpenSolaris. Ted has a great way of cutting through the marketing BS and gets right to the heart of what’s going on. Obviously I completely agree with him on a few issues. Do any of these sound familiar? I think I’ve covered some of this before here, and here, and here.
From Ted:
So that explains why it’s take three long years to try to get basic open source development tools (such as putting Open Solaris source code in a distributed SCM located outside of the Sun firewall) for Open Solaris. It was never was Sun’s intention to try to promote a kernel engineering community, or at least, it was certainly not a high priority for them to do so.
So if you run into a Sun salescritter or a Sun CEO claiming that OpenSolaris is just like Linux, it’s not. Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community.
I find it unbelievable Sun’s executives still forge ahead as though there are no issues - this was a half baked plan when it launched and unfortunately Sun has to cut costs and can’t invest what’s required to do this right (not to mention Sun also made some big mistakes - anyone using the CDDL?). In the meantime, Sun and its investors have missed out on the huge Linux boom that quite honestly… Sun was best positioned to take advantage of. Oops…
Jonathan, what community are you looking at - where is it? Please show me. (I’m sure your shareholders would be interested too.
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April 27th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Simon Phipps said:
Y’know, Michael, I would never get away with talking about Linux the way you do about OpenSolaris. Suffice to say that despite you both having one or two fair points there’s plenty to argue with in your (and Ted’s) comments, but attempting to do so with either of you is unlikely to help anyone much.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:13 am
md said:
But Simon, I’d posit that the one or two fair points we’re making are fairly important and are significant roadblocks to wider adoption. And it’s not just Ted and Mike - look at Roy’s resignation letter, look at the comments from people who tried to enter the OpenSolaris community and participate. Look at how many people agree with the points we’re making - the Linux community is very large and very opinionated, but it is a very successful community by almost any measure b/c it’s very open. There’s a reason IBM, HP, Oracle, Intel, AMD (competitors) can come together and co-develop in a massive ecosystem - the underlying infrastructure for the Linux community is truly open.