Archive for the 'Sun' Category
Friday, July 11th, 2008
Sunset? A failed open source strategy?
Has mismanagement finally done Sun in? Unfortunately I have to wonder if Jonathan has done irreparable damage. I think a lack of a real strategy to embrace Linux has led to this problem… Schwartz tried to turn Sun into an “open source company” but what does that really mean? How many companies have taken a similar approach and generated shareholder value? The best “open source companies” know better, they know how to manage and really use open source effectively to support their strategy - they don’t make it the strategy.
I just shake my head when Jonathan compares Sun to Google - it’s not true, not even within a mile. Google has a proprietary product in its search business - it’s built on open source, yes. But open source supports their strategy - to sell ads. If Sun “opened” Solaris correctly and at the right time, perhaps it could have done well. But you have to look for a strategy that works today, not a few years ago.
A strategy starts with what will customers buy from you. Refusing to accept that customers want fast, efficient servers running business solutions on Linux and Windows (note, not “open source”) could be cited as a cause of the downfall, or sunset if you allow me a pun.
I feel for the employees at Sun that will lose out first, before management. There are a lot of great people with great talent there and I can only hope the upper management is replaced and Sun as a company gets set straight by a professional with actual business execution ability. I would like to continue seeing Sun in the tech industry, perhaps not as the vendor we know it today. Maybe I’m just nostalgic, but too many great technologies have come from Sun employees in an innovative environment to just go the way of DEC or SGI.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/10/sun_under_gun/
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2008/07/09/sun-micro-could-ceo-schwartz-be-on-his-way-out/
Thoughts? Am I all alone on this?
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.
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” arrives tomorrow
Unless you’ve been without internet access for days, you should know by now that Ubuntu’s next release is due tomorrow and that is always an exciting time. So fire up your fastest mirror tomorrow and see how much bandwidth you can grab before a billion others do the same ;)
I really like the direction Mark is taking with Ubuntu on the server. One, it offers a competing model for the industry compared to the RHEL/SLES model, two Ubuntu is pushing the technology further (e.g. KVM) and making it very easy for users to adopt (ala Microsoft Windows), and finally, it’s one platform that does well in many circles from desktop to server (ala Windows). So while Red Hat, Novell and Oracle fight over what’s left of Sun’s Solaris install base and grab some of the Windows opportunity, Ubuntu is driving straight into the Windows Vista SP1 Party with a fresh alternative. Now let’s just get those “Apple-like” Ubuntu systems we need with all the Adobe apps on them ;-)
Ubuntu article: http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2008/042108-ubuntu-linux-takes-on-enterprise.html?page=1
P.S. I claim absolutely no insight into what amount of sheer stupidity or drunkenness led to that Microsoft video link. I think sogrady said it best with just, “words fail me”.
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Are April Fools’ posts for fools? Are you fooled? I pity the fool
Ask a good IP lawyer you know whether Jonathan *could* do this if he suddenly wanted to… ask your IP savvy lawyer to read the Solaris 10 license, then the Contributor Agreement, patents that could cover Solaris and explain to you what IP a vendor could still control or use against you if you were to start making OpenSPARC chips, ship Solaris around the world, etc… You may also look at what Solaris products you actually might use on a server… and the IP/licenses associated there. Have you seen anyone benchmarking Solaris 10 and publishing results online? Oh, that’s right, it’s not allowed (See the post from emantion near the end). Was that a surprise to you considering all the “open” messaging you may be hearing? Did you confuse OpenSolaris with Solaris 10?
Then consider that while the CDDL isn’t too bad, it was intentionally developed to be incompatible with the GPL and the only open source OS to really matter, the Linux kernel. (Sorry BSD guys… I know… you’re hurt, but … sorry) Once you have an answer from your astute lawyer, I’d ask, would having all that power and control in one vendor concern you? Could they take it away?
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/a_new_strategy
I pity the fool.
Now ask your lawyer to read the GPL license that comes with RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Asianux, OEL or SLES (ignoring MSFT/Novell for the moment). Simpler? Want to post a benchmark comparing any Linux distro’s performance? Go right ahead. Can any 1 vendor stop you? No…
Continuing this line of thought, now look at where all the other industry vendors participating in mass open source collaboration are heavily investing right now, today, and tomorrow. You can read about this over at the Linux Foundation (yes, the second plug for this fine work). Or you can look at Apache or even one that surprises me daily, Eclipse.
http://www.linux-foundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php
And some actually are still surprised that Red Hat keeps growing amid pointed attacks from Sun, Microsoft, and Oracle? “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Winning was just the next step ;-) Congratulations Red Hat, Novell, Debian, and Ubuntu.
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Who really writes “Linux”? A special report from the Linux Foundation
Steven posted a good eWeek article summarizing the recent Linux Foundation report on who writes and contributes to the Linux kernel development. Too many have written blogs with titles like “who writes Linux” that I had to put “Linux” in quotes in my title. The reason is that this document/report is about the Linux kernel and there are many things that people commonly associate with “Linux” that are outside the kernel. Think of Gnome which is written by the Gnome community, KDE which is sponsored by Trolltech, package management tools from Red Hat, Debian or Novell (e.g. YaST, Apt Yum), a multitude of libraries, and even OpenOffice which is still controlled by Sun, but now with contributions from IBM.
So I would agree this report is fantastic - it provides a view into what’s going on beyond what we “think” happens. The Linux kernel community is a great success story in what Amanda calls “mass community collaboration” - even more ironic because there are many competitors, vendors, academics, hobbyists, customers and other random experts collaborating in one place.
Read the report (it’s “free as in beer”) and find out everything you wanted to know about Linux kernel development (including perhaps that IBM is the #3 contributor to the kernel). The story this report tells is a truly unique feature of the Linux community. You won’t see it anywhere in the communities or practices of other OSs, no matter how “open” they proclaim to have become.
The report is interesting in how it also debunks some myths that somehow get spread around. For instance, some have said “kernel development will slow down as the features catch up to UNIX/Windows”. Not true.
Some have said “Linux is just IBM” or “Linux is just Red Hat” trying to position Linux as dominated or caused by one entity that they’re not fond of. Again, not true (see the section of the report on Contributors).
Finally, take a look at how some end user companies are participating and reaping the benefits of a true collaborative development community. Did you know your next VW will be powered by Linux? Did you ever think the same features that make an auto’s systems “crash-proof” could also help on a server or mobile phone? The VW bullet is a pure example of innovation being applied to adjacent spaces - it would never happen in Windows, AIX or Solaris.
- Companies like Sony, Nokia, and Samsung ship Linux as a component of products like video cameras, television sets, and mobile telephones. Working with the development process helps these companies ensure that Linux will continue to be a solid base for their products in the future.
- Companies which are not in the information technology business can still find working with Linux beneficial. The 2.6.25 kernel will include an implementation of the PF_CAN network protocol which was contributed by Volkswagen. PF_CAN allows for reliable communications between components in an interference-prone environment – such as that found in an automobile. Linux gave Volkswagen a platform upon which it could build its networking code; the company then found it worthwhile to contribute the code back so that it could be maintained with the rest of the kernel. http://lwn.net/Articles/253425/ for more information on this work.
So with that I will end my praises and simply point you to the source over at the LF website here.
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
Microsoft Windows 7 going to look a lot like Linux?
It seems like Sun and Microsoft, for all their anti-Linux crusading are both sending strong signals that their OS’s will in the future look a lot more like Linux…
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Monday, March 10th, 2008
NVIDIA Quadro Driver runs fastest on… Linux? What, not Windows??
It’s true, the NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux appears to best Windows and Solaris - and by a wide margin. I think the “Linux support” issue can be somewhat put to bed finally - except for ease of updating with kernel revs… now that is usually a pain still. I am somewhat amazed at how strongly Windows secured a last place finish… I wonder how much is due to the driver and how much to the OS…
By the way, if you’re wondering how a company got away with comparing performance with Solaris (which is not allowed per the Solaris license), you should note that they used the Solaris Express Developer Edition which I can only assume does not have the clause preventing non-Sun licensed parties from publishing Solaris performance results (I have not read that license myself, but am guessing Phoronix did - or they secured permission from Sun…).
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_workstation_perf&num=1
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
OpenSolaris issues are similar to OpenOffice?
I somehow missed this comment the other day… very interesting Sam. I’ve heard the same, but your history obviously lends more direct credibility. Let’s not forget Sun’s recent accomplishments with OpenDS either… see a pattern? ;-)
Mike-
You may be interested to know that the OpenSolaris Community developments you & Roy have described read like an OpenOffice.org redux. (I speak from the experience of an ex-Marketing Project Lead of OpenOffice.org)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.
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Roy Fielding responds to the OpenSolaris “ripple” in his own words
If you’ve read any of the OpenSolaris/Roy Fielding news on any of the sites/blogs covering the news, you are obliged to also read Roy’s own explanation on his blog. I think many of my comments here are also in-line with Roy’s view. Now everyone can go comment/complain about how negative Roy’s being on his own blog ;-)
http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/watching-the-ripples
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Stephen O’Grady covers the OpenSolaris debate
A must read. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised by the balanced view Stephen posted this evening - it’s O’Grady at his best. I am a bit surprised he weighed in at all though - as he put it, there are a few things he’d rather do “Including having a few of my fingernails pulled out.”
Despite the painful picture that portrays, I’d recommend his post as a very well articulated and valuable Q&A to read if you’re interested in the topic. Sometimes the best work is the hardest… but I’m already brainwashed in Linux myself so it comes easy to me ;-)
Friday, February 15th, 2008
Emily Ratliff covers Roy Fielding’s Departure from OpenSolaris
I love feed technologies - I just saw Emily posted on Roy Fielding’s departure from OpenSolaris. She made one point that I had to chuckle over:
To date, Sun has received 578 patches[4], which represents a rate of 0.6 patches a day (first patch dated 6/17/05, there were some earlier undated contributions). Linus gets more patches while he is brushing his teeth than OpenSolaris gets in a week.
And one that just really irked me about just how messed up Sun has been on its approach to building a Linux-like community:
For me, the realization that Sun just doesn’t get it, and never will, was crystallized the day I was turned away from an OpenSolaris Users’ Group meeting for refusing to sign an NDA.
Perhaps I should have applied for a job at Sun and tried to fix it myself. However, I think this strategy starts at the top and so Sun would have to offer me a very high position to fix this big of a mess.
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Open source communities and success: Dana gets it
On the heels of my prior post, I saw this:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2014
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
“I told you so” in order? Roy Fielding resigns from OpenSolaris
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-February/004488.html
In my opinion, Roy came up short in fully describing the issue, but he did a great job focusing on the thread at hand regarding OpenSolaris and trademark. The fact is, Sun is not an open source community or development player. Sun wants all the benefits of saying it’s all about open and freedom, yet, Sun does something completely different. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, the development is still behind the firewall inside Sun. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, open source community developers would have to get Sun engineers to agree to accept code. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, developers have to contribute copyright co-ownership to the corporation, Sun, in order to contribute to OpenSolaris. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, there are still essential parts of the Solaris OS that are still not opened under a free license (they call it the OpenSolaris Binary License… aka proprietary). I could go on and on… but let me refer to Roy’s view below.
Will Ian be next to resign? I can’t believe he really believes this is the right execution of what sounded like an “open” strategy 2 years ago… I knew better, but many fell for the bedtime story that sounded sweet. Some will still argue that Sun’s great, open, etc., but they’re brainwashed; anyone who really knows what’s going on should not be fooled at this point in the game. “Open”Solaris is an OS that is created by 1 company, with no outside input or control and has a code repo on opensolaris.org… besides that, what has it done to contribute or help any community of users?
Some choice quotes:
Sun didn’t just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris; they made promises about it being an open development project. That’s the only way they could get someone like me to provide free labor for their benefit. Given Sun’s recent track record on breaking promises, another one doesn’t surprise me at all.
…
Most of the stuff in that letter about Sun’s responsibilities in
regard to “International Trademark Law” is nothing more than
snow being tossed in the eyes of technical folks who don’t have
access to their own lawyers.
…
In fact, if it weren’t for the extremely pig-headed way in which Indiana was thrust on the community as Ian’s private domain, it could have easily been a unifying path for
all of the distros. It could have given them a gate within OpenSolaris in which to collaborate, instead of doing all of their work in separate communities outside OpenSolaris.Indiana is just another private marketing team within Sun that is making private decisions about “OpenSolaris” that aren’t even in line with the internal processes of Solaris Engineering, let alone the published governance model of the OGB.
…
Sun agreed that “OpenSolaris” would be governed by the community and yet has refused, in every step along the way, to cede any real control over the software produced or the way it is produced, and continues to make private decisions every day that are later promoted as decisions for this thing we call OpenSolaris. Rather than be honest about it and restructure the community to correspond to this MySolaris style of over-the-wall development, Sun prefers to lie to the external community members while ignoring their input.
…
This well is poisoned; the company has consumed its own future and any pretense that the projects will ever govern themselves (as opposed to being governed by whatever pointy-haired boss is hiding behind the scenes) is now a joke.
…
There’s nothing particularly wrong with that choice — it is a perfectly valid open source model for corporations that don’t need active community participation. IMO, the resulting code tends to suck a lot more than community-driven projects, but it is still open source.
In any case, I am done with it. I hereby resign my status as a Member of the OpenSolaris Community, effective immediately.
Monday, February 4th, 2008
A processor market “I told you so”
It’s always interesting to see predictions like this one on processor innovations, volumes and success/failures actually coming true.
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
And the best Sun/MySQL Acquisition Analysis Award goes to…
drumroll please…
Jeff Gould. [applause]
Jeff’s analysis is dead on in my opinion and I found his application of business forces and behavior offers an analytical lens focusing on the real impact with great clarity. I’ve yet to see anyone prove MySQL can provide investors return on $1B using any conventional financial decision model. I’d like to also congratulate Oracle on a great move … (via Sun). Sometimes the smart thing to do is have one of these shirts on when you visit Redwood City (notice the arrow points in the right direction).
Anyway, you can read Jeff’s take here:
http://www.interopnews.com/news/can-sun-make-mysql-pay.html
BTW, if you’re curious, Mr. “My Sox stole your Tribe’s training program” O’Grady forced a very close, ballot-chad recount, second place finish with a very complete analysis over a Redmonk.com.
Update: It does appear Mr. O’Grady may contest the recount and this may drag on a while longer.
Monday, January 21st, 2008
An interesting follow-on commentary to my Linux and OpenSolaris post
I found this post interesting and if you can read Spanish, I encourage you to check it out. While it appears Sergio disagrees with me on economics driving participation (and hey, disagreement is allowed), you can see he then builds off my argument by offering four constructive rules to building an open, developer community. I liked his post and encourage you to check it out. It seems Sergio would also agree with Mark Shuttleworth from Ubuntu on the structure that drives participation.
http://www.lapastillaroja.net/archives/001454.html
El caso es que una licencia libre es condición necesaria pero no suficiente para crear una Comunidad. La licencia es como la ley, pero luego viene el reglamento, que, para que se forme una Comunidad requiere:
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Mike Strosaker Takes on Sun’s Predictive Self Healing Claims
Mike Strosaker has a couple points to make about Sun’s claims of predictive self healing relative to Linux. One thing I’ve noticed is that Sun (and Microsoft) always compare one of their features to Linux on Intel/AMD and ignore the capabilities of Linux on Power, Itanium or Mainframe platforms (which, btw are growing faster than Linux on x86). It’s time to wakeup and realize that Linux runs anywhere and takes on the capabilities of the hardware platform.
Check it out Mike’s comparison here for the details: http://zombieprocess.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/predictive-self-healing-on-linux-on-power/
Sun frequently touts their “predictive self-healing” implementation in Solaris 10. I wonder if that bullet point would be further down the list if they were familiar with the error detection, prediction, and correction capabilities of Linux on POWER platforms. In fact, the Linux on POWER implementation precedes the Solaris 10 implementation by at least a year (Solaris 10 was released in January 2005; SLES 8 had this solution for POWER in 2003, and RHEL 3 had it in 2004 at the latest).
Monday, January 14th, 2008
Toshiba Spurs Engine: Cell processors in laptops and TVs … could it be an x86 and Power/Cell race in the datacenter?
There’s always a flood of news coming out of CES, but one that I find interesting that also impacts the server and technology market is a bit of news from Toshiba. As this video shows, Toshiba has embedded a Cell BE processor (yes, the same ones in PS3s) into a laptop and a television. The reason is that the Cell processor is far more capable of handling video rendering and stream computing than a typical general processor such as you find from Intel or AMD.
Now you may watch the video and then wonder ‘what the heck does this imply for the server market?’ and you’d be right to ask. Interestingly, Scott Handy from IBM recently did an interview with The Register and gave everyone the answer. The processor marketplace for desktops, laptops, mobile devices and servers requires huge volumes to provide economic returns to manufacturers. There is a huge capital investment that goes into every generation of processor not to mention all the IP that must be created to advance from one generation to the next. Similar to software sold on CD, producing the first chip may cost $1B and the second chip $500M, and it only gets cheaper as your volumes increase. In order to maintain a processor business profitably, chip makers live off volumes (hence the huge battles between Intel and AMD). Now the problem facing Intel for Itanium and Sun for SPARC is that these server technologies have no consumer application that will drive additional volumes. In terms of volume, the server market is a spec in chip consumption.
Yet the processor market is a rat race - vendors need enormous chip volumes to provide funding for future chip designs and whoever has the most funding, tends to produce the winning chips (see Intel for years despite competition from AMD). In fact one might point to Itanium as Intel’s decline - a chip that never saw the volumes needed to make it a competitive chip. Then as Intel was divesting profits from its x86 chips into Itanium chips, it suddenly found itself behind AMD. For a good grin, take a look at IDC’s forecasts for Itanium and the ‘revisions’ to those estimates. Heck, probably the only person to have worked around Itanium and advanced their career was Ashlee Vance.
Now look at Sun and SPARC and you see what used to be a high volume SPARC or UltraSPARC platform with many 1-4 way SPARC servers going into every datacenter giving Sun ‘good enough’ volumes to invest in future generations of processors. Then comes along Intel and Linux and Windows wiping out low end SPARC volume servers and cornering SPARC processors into a lower volume mid-high end server market. Without the funds for future generations of chips, Sun has to resort to stopgap measures craftily using old SPARC core designs in a Niagara multicore processor configuration. Regardless, that still doesn’t create high volume - the non-x86 server market is actually relatively low volume.
When you look at Power processors in everything from Mars rovers to cars, servers, printers and today it’s used in all 3 gaming systems (Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii). The gaming market alone consumes tens of millions of processors (far more than the server market). The Cell BE processor in the PS3 and IBM or Mercury Cell blades actually have 1 power core (PE) and 8 synergistic processing units (SPEs). The PE acts as a ‘router’ for instructions and data sent to the SPEs. So an application developer write much of the code similar to a power architecture when targeting a Cell based system. (Now I’m oversimplifying processor architectures a ton here, I’ll admit - but the point is not to debate the differences between PowerPC/POWER and Cell PE/SPE units… look at the big picture).
Now, going back to servers you can understand that winning in servers requires a high volume chip that funds future chip development and generates economic profits for the manufacturer. Without funds to invest in future chips, you lose the race. Once you view it all in this light, it becomes easier to see why the Power, ARM and Intel/AMD x86/x64 architectures are far ahead of other RISC or other architectures - they have volume. POWER6 was no small ’speed bump’ - POWER6 is a fierce chip with raw compute power and system throughput that leapfrogged its competitors. It took economic profits reinvested into chip design over years to create it. Cell is no different. And with Cell and Power having volumes in non-server markets including now potentially Toshiba laptops and TVs, I’ll leave you to place your bets on which architectures will be around in the server market for years to come.
Oh, and I should also note that Linux is the only OS that runs on both the Cell BE and POWER processors ;-) Guess which OS is likely to be around in your next generation server, television, printer and … well if only we could ‘fix’ the desktop/laptop market reliance on a different OS…
Friday, December 7th, 2007
Comparing “open source” projects? Start by asking why does the project exist.
I’ve thus far made no mention of OpenDS and the wildfire reporting that has ensued, but there was one aspect of this situation I commented on to Stephen O’Grady and others on #redmonk when it came out that bugged me. It was a question: “how did it ever get to this point?”. How does a company - a profit seeking company, not a wild tongued developer - even get into an OpenDS situation? I believe the answer is that many people have wrongly assumed that the label “open source” indicates a project is disentangled from corporate affairs. Let me explain.
It’s not my place to determine whether any of the current buzz words today that mingle corporate led open code projects under various licensing and governance constructs are “right” or “wrong”, but I do have a strong opinion that the independent open source projects often have a leg up in building communities, participation, and multi-vendor investment (and often that’s their goal). I also think it’s foolish to expect any single company, commercially led project should behave in any manner other than a commercial business driven by stockholders would. I’m not defending or accusing Sun or any of the OpenDS developers; I’m focusing instead on what fundamental misunderstandings of “open source” may have led to all the hype that’s ensued.
I’ll start by saying I believe the “open” in “open source” projects is not well defined consistently and so confusion abounds when people compare “open source” X project to “open source” Y project. The compare is flawed in that each project may have a completely different reason for existence. Commercially run open source projects are inherently different from non-corporate, multi-vendor, open collaboration projects. That does not mean one is more “evil”, “good” or “bad” but rather that they’re apples and oranges. However, for whatever reason, the ability to view code has led to people lumping them together in the same classification called “open source”.
Linux and OpenSolaris are so different, I cringe whenever I hear people compare them (and yet I get dragged into doing comparisons myself to prove it’s not proper). It’s not that any one approach is by definition right or wrong - they have different reasons for existence. I do believe strongly that “Linux” is a great approach for its community’s goals - but Linux starts with a community, not a vendor’s goals. And so it becomes an issue when you compare a commercially driven project to a community led project - the reason for their existence is entirely different. There are different situations and goals that warrant a different project governance, control, license, and decision making construct for these projects.
Look at Eclipse. For full disclosure, I work at IBM. I’ve also only been at IBM since 2005 so Eclipse “happened” before my time. While Eclipse’ roots trace back to IBM, I don’t believe IBM had a single product that used Eclipse when it was “open sourced”. Some intelligent visionaries at IBM saw that the world needed an extensible IDE and platform for building out the next generation of desktop applications. Eventually Eclipse added Eclipse RCP and today IBM has Lotus Notes, Symphony, Rational, WebSphere and probably other Tivoli and IM tools and products built on Eclipse. Adobe, BEA, Borland, Oracle, SAP (competitors) are all “Strategic Members” of Eclipse and all have products that use Eclipse code (as do many other commercial software vendors). Did IBM intend to make money on Eclipse itself or intend to help its software competitors with code?
What was IBM’s goal then? Could it have been to disrupt the status quo, to change the landscape, foster open standards, build an ecosystem of investors, and ultimately move the industry forward? (something even a vendor as large as IBM could not do alone) I think we all know the answer to that. Just look at the results: a huge membership of Eclipse.org - look at how many of these for profit companies are using Eclipse in their own products. Could Eclipse’ structure be anything other that what it is to have the same impact? I don’t believe so.
Very few Eclipse “members” actually make money on selling the Eclipse code itself - they generate revenue using Eclipse in their products and extensions of the code. These members also reduce cost through collaborative, community based shared development. There are economic drivers and business value moving Eclipse forward. The revenue has moved from selling the IDE or RCP code to selling ancillary products/services leveraging and extending the code. What part of Eclipse Foundation does IBM own and control at Eclipse.org? Answer: None. How many times does “IBM” appear in the Eclipse Foundation Governance Bylaws? Answer: 0. With this independence, the Eclipse community has chosen Eclipse’ future, moving towards the needs of member users, towards innovative new developments, and ultimately has created a very malleable, extensible codebase upon with hundreds (maybe thousands) of products rely - whether IBM liked it or not.
It amuses me to see the OpenSolaris community now in a riff over Sun naming the Project Indiana OpenSolaris distro… well… OpenSolaris (second time’s a charm?). As a corporate company can decide, Sun has chosen to own and control all of the copyright and trademark IP, the Solaris architecture decisions, governance appears to “report” to Sun, Even the OpenSolaris community’s “Constitution” mentions Sun Microsystems, Inc. and is marked with a Sun copyright at the bottom. Sun employees hold 6 out of the 7 Governance Board seats, and all of the opensolaris.org infrastructure is owned and managed by Sun. Anyone who does contribute code must first sign over copyright to Sun, the company. This is not “like Linux” at all and it irks me when people compare them as if they’re similar products that should be compared.
So what standing does any “community member” have to tell Sun not to name Project Indiana what Sun wants to name it? This is not a “Foundation” or independent not for profit project. Sun is ultimately in this to make money on the productization of Solaris (why… after two years are there no competing commercial *Solaris distros as we see with Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Ubuntu, etc?). The only group with standing to tell Sun what to do is Sun’s stockholders. It could only have been delusion or sheer blindness that led some community members to overlook that OpenSolaris has a different reason for existence and hence differing goals and mission as something like Linux. You cannot and should not compare them and you absolutely should not assume one “should be” like the other.
Look at the results. Start with how many people have contributed code to OpenSolaris (and look at what they’re contributing if you have time). OpenSolaris is Sun’s own project - I can confidently state there is no outside development of any significant substance directing the architecture of Solaris / OpenSolaris different from what Sun the company would have done anyway. Two “community developers” (Juergen Keil and Richard Lowe) account for nearly 40% of all accepted contributions - just two developers. Only 84 developers have contributed anything at all - ever (including small typos fixes, accepted or not). Outside contributors must have a Sun employee review, approve and integrate their code. And after two years, it seems some are starting to just realize, this Sun controlled model may not be the best approach. Those who do suddenly “wake up” have been relying on a false assumption. They assume OpenSolaris exists for them or should be like Linux or some other “open source” project they know about - and the reality is, it never was. It’s all about Sun’s stockholders.
What about Linux? There are approximately 2,000 Linux kernel contributors to each release alone (this does not include the massive work going on above the kernel). Looking at the commercial contributors to Linux, you will find a “who’s who” of IT and electronics vendors (also take a look at the LF membership). With Linux, copyright of the Linux kernel code is retained solely by the authors, there are many non-profit foundations supporting the components of a Linux distribution, and because decision making is merit based by community members, no one company controls (or stops) what goes in. Step back to the start of Linux and it’s obvious the intent for this project’s existence was very different than Sun had for OpenSolaris.
So returning to the subject of the post, I have come to the conclusion that much of the “open source” hype and “hurt feelings” are rooted in fundamental confusion about what “open source” means especially in single-vendor led and controlled projects. The only reason anyone should be surprised by anything Sun does with OpenSolaris, OpenDS, or any of the other Sun open source projects it controls, is because that person has fundamentally created an expectation that access to source code meant more than just that - and that is a flawed assumption.
Commercially led projects are created for commercial reasons. “Community members” should not force their own expectations on these projects or they’re likely to see disappointment, frustrations, and unnecessary hype when the company does something counter to what is expected. The same holds true for other companies as well, including IBM. Consider this Q&A about commercial project expectations from Stephen O’Grady back in June:
Q: Do you think that this Open Commercial Development represents an ideal hybrid of open source and commercial development philosophies?
A: It all depends on your expectations. If the idea is that some of the benefits of open source - be they community QA and bug reporting, feature suggestions, and so on - will be realized via this model, then yes. If the intent, however, is to build a vibrant, open source style community, a la Eclipse, then the answer is no, it isn’t.
It all starts with having the right expectation. Is Sun at fault on anything with OpenDS or OpenSolaris? Hey, no one’s perfect, but who can know for sure? Some may point to poor communication of its intent and goals for the projects (and improper comparisons to Linux). Too often I see Sun executives trying to position OpenSolaris as “like Linux”, but those who do research and homework, will likely understand the reality the hype-driving-community often ignores. Is this the “holy grail”, “silver bullet” answer to squash the hype? Absolutely not; communities will speculate forever. However, it’s easier to stay out of the hype if your message is consistent and clear.
You might be wondering what kicked off this massive post today? The answer is odd, but it was a quote from Bruce Perens in an El Reg article. In case any of the above post left my position to question, I agree with Bruce and this quote seems a great place to end.
“In general open source is only going to work if you let it be a community led project. Sun has had a hard time learning this, and some of their open source projects have had a hard time getting outside contributors, because Sun has insisted on owning the whole thing,” Perens said.
Sunday, October 7th, 2007
Ashlee Vance from The Register Interviews Mark Shuttleworth
I saw this just before I went on a road trip back to NY this weekend and burned it to a CD. I’d recommend taking the time to listen to Mark with special focus on the parts where he describes what it takes to have successful outside contributions for open-commercial projects. There is also plenty of discussion on the “troubles” with OpenOffice and outside contributions as well as desktop Linux. And of course, there is the usual Reg-humor to keep the discussion lively.
http://www.theregister.com/2007/10/04/open_season_four_shuttleworth/
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