IBM on OpenSolaris
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a vice president at IBM comments on
OpenSolaris in AME Info -- IBM's
top Linux expert:
Some really nice comments in that first paragraph of Irving's respond about communities and the high quality of people that gather around great source code. We're doing just that with OpenSolaris -- building a community of really talented developers and evangelists who love this code base. So, I agree. With that part, anyway.
Q: How do you think Sun moving Solaris
to open source will affect the Linux momentum?
A: That's a very interesting question. In my mind, the key to an open-source project is the quality of the community behind it.
When we at IBM choose to join an open-source community, whether it is Linux, grid, Apache or-more recently-the Geronimo community that's building an open Web application server based on Apache, it's the quality of the community that drives the decision. How good are the people? How diverse are they? What kind of resources do they have? The better the community, the more likely we are to join it.
Now that's very different from a vendor saying they're going to let other people look at their source code. Because, by and large, the only people interested in a proprietary product are the existing people who work with it. And even then, the product wasn't designed to be worked on by people outside of the company.
So it's difficult to look at that. That's a long way of saying I don't see the Solaris move as coming anywhere near to the community that Linux has built up. It'll probably be of value to some parts of the Solaris ecosystem, so it's probably a good step for Sun, but I honestly doubt that you'll see the large numbers of smart people in other companies and universities help build this offering like they do with grid, Apache and Linux.
A: That's a very interesting question. In my mind, the key to an open-source project is the quality of the community behind it.
When we at IBM choose to join an open-source community, whether it is Linux, grid, Apache or-more recently-the Geronimo community that's building an open Web application server based on Apache, it's the quality of the community that drives the decision. How good are the people? How diverse are they? What kind of resources do they have? The better the community, the more likely we are to join it.
Now that's very different from a vendor saying they're going to let other people look at their source code. Because, by and large, the only people interested in a proprietary product are the existing people who work with it. And even then, the product wasn't designed to be worked on by people outside of the company.
So it's difficult to look at that. That's a long way of saying I don't see the Solaris move as coming anywhere near to the community that Linux has built up. It'll probably be of value to some parts of the Solaris ecosystem, so it's probably a good step for Sun, but I honestly doubt that you'll see the large numbers of smart people in other companies and universities help build this offering like they do with grid, Apache and Linux.
Some really nice comments in that first paragraph of Irving's respond about communities and the high quality of people that gather around great source code. We're doing just that with OpenSolaris -- building a community of really talented developers and evangelists who love this code base. So, I agree. With that part, anyway.
Posted by Glynn Foster on October 11, 2005 at 04:29 PM JST #