If the OSDL were a greengrocer, they'd only sell oranges.

Monday May 15, 2006

A few weeks ago I wrote to a journalist who had just published a story about a company which had recently migrated from Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The IT manager interviewed clearly wasn't aware that Solaris is an open source operating system, and the story did nothing to correct that perception with the reader (far from it). So I wrote to the journalist concerned, politely pointing out that Solaris is, in fact, an open source OS. I received a prompt and courteous reply which included the comment:

I was aware that Solaris had been opened, but was writing the article from the point of view of the user.

In other words, writing from the point of view of someone who didn't know better. The journalist went on to indicate that she would be interested in writing about OpenSolaris in the future. Well, maybe, but it seems rather like mercenary journalism to me.

Anyway, I had to think of that encounter last week when reading about Mr Stuart Cohen's nonsensical critique of Sun's open source policy. The byline accompanying the piece states:

Stuart Cohen is CEO of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a not-for-profit consortium of IT vendors, Linux developers, and Global 2000 companies.

(although strangely, it neglected to mention Mr Cohen's legendary performance as Frank Poncherello in the TV classic, CHiPs)

Ponch Cohen

Er, anyway, from the OSDL's own website, we can read that their mission is

To accelerate the deployment of Linux for enterprise

Let's be clear, the OSDL is a reputable organisation which has invested in helping people contribute to Linux, including Sun engineers who will have attended its recent Desktop Architects Meeting. It would be inappropriate to accuse the organisation of having a hidden agenda, other than to note that the name, Open Source Development Labs, is a little misleading (there is, after all, more to open source than Linux), and that the consortium includes many of Sun's fiercest competitors, something you might not immediately realise when reading that it is a "not-for-profit consortium".

So why so steamed up?

Well, pontification comes naturally to me, but this was a very one-sided story in an influential publication from an apparently authoritative and neutral source, reminiscent in that sense of the recent Rob Enderle quote which appeared in the Economist. What's different is that this article is stuffed with a freakish quantity of factual errors, many of which a motivated researcher with access to Google could catch while waiting for the kettle to boil.

Glossing over Mr Cohen's various misapprehensions about Sun's past (including the progeny of Solaris and Java and the performance of SPARC), and those about Mr Jonathan Schwartz's credentials for the CEO job at Sun (he seems unaware of Mr Schwartz stint at the helm of Lighthouse Design), his prescription for the future reads like a wish-list from, er, Sun's fiercest competitors.

Inter alia, Mr Cohen advocates that:
Sun should open source Java technology (in his rehashing of Peter Yared's recent letter to Jonathan Schwartz, he fails to touch on the benefits for Sun, or Java, of such a move);
set OpenOffice.org "free" (although as OpenOffice.org is licensed under the LGPL, it is hard to see why he isn't leveling similar criticisms at MySQL or JBoss who use the same licensing and copyright terms - is he unhappy with Sun's massive contribution to the project?);
and drop both its SPARC and AMD hardware lines (no explanation here, other than it would help Sun to be a "software company" if it didn't have the strongest hardware product line in its history, products which pose a considerable threat to OSDL member, Intel).

Unusually for the OSDL, Mr Cohen does not call for Sun to drop Solaris, instead he merely contents himself with slinging mud in its direction:

Last year, Sun made its flagship operating system -- Solaris -- available as open source. Sort of. You see, Sun wrote its own open-source license. It's a license that many in the open-source community don't like, and with good reason. Unlike with Linux, all the rights to any changes to the source code for Solaris go back to Sun. So any developers contributing to Solaris are literally working for Sun for free.

Sort of? Mr Cohen is referring to the Common Development and Distribution License, CDDL, an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license which even the Free Software Foundation (FSF) regards as a free software license. By any reasonable application of the term, the CDDL is a free and open source license. The FSF does have an objection to the CDDL: that it is not a strong "copyleft", recognising as it does the term "intellectual property", and the intellectual property of the contributor.

Do the OSDL's backers share the FSF's world view? Can we expect HP, IBM and Unisys, amongst others, to renounce intellectual property? Hardly. Although they are presumably delighted for developers contributing to the GNU/Linux operating system to renounce their intellectual property rights.

Having struggled through Mr Cohen's piece, I remain baffled as to what revenue model he is proposing for Sun. I think that Sun's approach is very clear: open source produces excellent software which is easy to migrate to and from (for many reasons, including being, er, free). Customers will always pay for components which retain a significant marginal cost of unit production such as hardware and services. The hardware and services they buy will be heavily influenced by the software platform they want to use, and they will increasingly choose for an open source platform. There remains a very strong case for using Solaris, and should they choose Solaris, where better to procure your hardware and services from but Sun. It's that simple.

Many of my colleagues in the open-source community are cynical about Sun's commitment to open source,

stews Cohen, not elaborating on whether they are cynical in private or merely in public. He also makes the verbal slight of hand of excluding Sun from the open source community. Which of the OSDL's members have made the level of contribution to open source that Sun has, and continues to? The OSDL's commitment, undoubted as it is, is to Linux, and not to open source.

ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer.