Sun to
Offer Solaris 10 Operating System for Free
But not everyone is impressed -- the industry values developer relationships over pricing, and Sun hasn't built a community, IDC says.
But not everyone is impressed -- the industry values developer relationships over pricing, and Sun hasn't built a community, IDC says.
Actually, we are building a community around OpenSolaris and have always stated we would. We have not launched yet as an open source project, so criticizing us for not already having "built a community" is unfair. It's coming. Don't worry.
Skipping around a bit.
Dan
Kusnetzky, an operating system analyst with IDC in Framingham, Mass.,
said Red Hat has seen success with Linux in the x86 space mainly due to
its relationships with developers. Sun, despite creating a world class
OS with Solaris, has by its statements and actions confused the open
source industry, he said.
What statements regarding OpenSolaris have been confusing? We've said we are open souring the Solaris platform. We've said we are doing this because we want to build a community from the Solaris installed base and extend the reach of the technology to new markets. We've said the license will be OSI approved. We've said we are forming a pilot program for early feedback before we launch. That's pretty much what we've said. How's that confusing? Sounds pretty reasonable and responsible to me. Now, I agree that Sun has made confusing statements regarding Linux and open source over the years. However, don't imply that those apply to OpenSolaris specifically. They do not. State clearly the distinction so your readers know your intention. By embedding a phrase about a specific product -- "despite creating a world class OS with Solaris" -- within the general criticism of Sun's overall strategy you are linking the two. It's subtle, but it's there. Not fair. You are not allowing OpenSolaris to be judged on its own merit and by its own actions. Also, as we open source our core product, I think you'll see our overall corporate open source strategy start to be more coherent. It's inevitable.
Moving along:
"Sun
has not built that community around its products. Sun has, if anything,
through its statements and actions, made many in that community upset,"
he said. "Merely throwing something over the wall doesn't necessarily
mean a community will form around it."
We haven't built a community around our products? Let's see. There's the Java Community Process. There's java.net. There's NetBeans. And Jxta. And OpenOffice. And Jini. And the Java Desktop System. Oh, don't forget Grid, too. And we also contribute to Gnome and Mozilla and who the heck knows what else out there. A couple dozen or so. I can't keep track anymore. And that's just the recent stuff. Go back a few years and you hit NFS and Bill Joy and BSD and all that. Anyway, it seems to me that Sun has significant experience building and contributing to developer communities and in basing our products on open source and open community code. A couple of decades, in fact. I'm not sure you can name a corporation with that level of experience. Can you?
Our next step is to build a global open source Solaris community. It will be called OpenSolaris and it will be probably the largest and most valuable donation of code to a community ever. And the community already lives right there within the Solaris installed base. We are providing 10 million lines of source code and the tools with which to build it, a new web site for collaboration, and an open source license to enfranchise the entire operation. We are bringing developers and customers and partners and ISVs and universities from all over the world into the OpenSolaris Pilot Program to actually begin the process of building a community -- which already involves developers from successful community sites such as sunfreeware.com and blastwave.org. We are also updating the Solaris development methodology and moving the damn thing right across the firewall to directly involve that community we are building -- a community that will start interacting with hundreds of Solaris engineers in a process that will be more and more transparent over time. But this stuff takes time. It's complex. No one has done this before, and we are determined to do it right. Keep in mind, as we are open sourcing the system and the internal Solaris community of 900 engineers, we are also delivering a fully tested, fully supported, multi-platform operating system to our customers. Talk about complexity.
Yep. Sure sounds like we are just tossing this over the wall and hoping a community somehow forms all by itself, doesn't it? My goodness. A lot of honorable people at Sun and within the community are working very hard to make this project a success. Give them some credit. At least give them the benefit of the doubt.
