When you read discussions like the Slashdot follow-up to John Loiacono's interview with LinuxWorld, it's kind of funny to look at the top-level comments - they tend to be the random rabid posts, the posts that are riddled with inaccuracies, written by trollers and fundamentalists. Ironically, the folks who actually know what they are talking about don't tend to post top-level - they respond to those posts, and then get overlooked if your Slashdot comment threshold is too low.

Two threads in particular are interesting as they actually climb out of the slime to get a lot closer to the truth:

• "I'm still amused", which finally adjudges lines-of-code to be an important measure of contributions to open-source, and points out that there is a Linux Standard (LSB) - I hope that poster's ears are burning (as most of us know, there is a suite of UNIX standards including POSIX, FHS, PAM, NFS, X11, http://freedesktop.org/, and the Single Unix Specification; most people who know something about these standards also know that Sun has been heavily active in all of them)

• "Sun founded on open source!? NOT in the kernel"; which acknowledges that Solaris is based on open-source (actually that thread focusses on Solaris's historic roots in BSD and misses out on recent additions such as GNOME, Apache, Perl, etc.); it also points out correctly that the open-source license for Solaris is not finalised yet but may actually be GPL

I would just like to encourage the folks who actually know something about UNIX and open-source to take a more active role on Slashdot and other forums; don't just leave it to the rebels without a clue to dominate the debate.

Update: I see I'm not the only Sunnie who's blogging about this interview and discussion; Jim Grisanzio and Marion Vermazen have some interesting insights.