Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Thursday September 30, 2004

Blogspehere debate on Sun and OSS

So Jonathan and RedHat's Tielman started up a debate, and then Marc Fleury of JBoss jumped in.

I talked with Marc when he came by for our JUG meeting and heard his discussion on Open Source. I admit, there is a difference between Professional Open Source and what Marc has termed Corporate Open Source.

At least when he was here, he did not, I don't think, make the argument that one was bad and the other was pure. But perhaps I was wrong.

In his posting over there though, he suggests that Sun is made up of "open source girlie men". I can see where in competitive sales situations he might start to see Sun as non-open source. Sun definitely has embraced open source for parts of the app server (the ones most used), while keeping other parts part of the product to itself. However, in other situations, Sun has entirely open sourced big chunks of code and has it's engineers work out in the open. Notably, OpenOffice, NetBeans and GNOME. Heck, in the GNOME case, the first thing Sun did was build in multilanguage support and accessability. Without these things, which weren't really being taken up by individual open source developers, GNOME's market addressability would be limited.

Does this mean Sun's business model is wrong? By Marc's post, he seems to contradict his earlier statements. He does seem to suggest it's wrong. I'd like to think that Sun could get credit where credit is due, and not be torn down because the world has changed since Sun shipped it's first product (which was based on open software and hardware, by the way). Major new projects like lookingglass, JDNC and JDIC are all being done out in the open. And with Sun's top-notch engineers. I lurk on the mailing lists, I guarantee there are great contributions from both Sun and the community. I don't know for certain, but most of the members of that community are contributing on behalf of the technology and the use of it at their companies (who by the way pay their bills). Isn't that one of the tenets of open source and community development? The stuff will be better because of all of those contributing to it have a vested interest in it?

I don't know that I agree with your blog Marc. As recently as two days ago, my team was having a conversation with a customer about how they'd adopted open source (in this case, 'professional open source') in a big way and were having trouble finding a stable environment that met all of their needs. I don't doubt JBoss can get a point-in-time stable environment with itself, but this customer needed stable with respect to the other guys too¹. Is it wrong for Sun to use open source as a way to allow for innovation, and then fold stable pieces of it back into products that can be licensed and OEMmed?

People smarter than me can figure that out. Or, we could just let the market decide.

1. Sun pushed within the J2EE expert group to delay the release of J2EE 1.4 to be compatible with WS-I BP. I'm not suggesting JBoss is not, I'm just suggesting that where it matters, Sun values open standards, not just open source. The latter sometimes means quickly releasing something and only talking about the standards.