Look at those who blindly give forth.

Tuesday May 30, 2006

I love it that Sun, and specifically OpenSolaris, is raising so many passions right now. And, as noted by Bryan Cantrill and Jim Grisanzio, we've had the perfect counterpoints.

It seems that the FreeBSD port of DTrace is starting to bear fruit. This is great news, and exactly what open sourcing Solaris was all about. DTrace, for those that haven't seen it, is the eye-poppingly brilliant observability framework in Solaris, OpenSolaris, and now FreeBSD. All this is great, and yes, we're all delighted, but lest we get complacent, there are those out there who aren't convinced by Sun nor by OpenSolaris.

First, and somewhat comically, we have BEA CEO and blues legend "Blind" Alfred Chuang, who last week explained his own company's great ongoing relevance to the market when he blindly said

Look at those who blindly open source. Solaris - two million lines of code. Useless.

Well, to label as "blindly open sourcing" the substantial efforts behind making OpenSolaris a reality (and especially the work that the engineering and marketing teams did before the code was opened last year to build an approachable community, work which I should point out was done before I joined the project) is offensive and misguided. As for "useless", well, I don't think that even needs refuting. Funnily enough, a former colleague at Sun went to work for BEA recently, working on ways to make sure that software license revenue is collected. Now from the open source perspective, that's useless*.

More importantly, to me at least, some of the turned-on and tuned-in remain sceptical, sceptical about Sun's commitment to open source, sceptical about Sun's ability to work with a community (see Slashdot or LugRadio forums for evidence of this. That's where I read the question:

Were there possible negative learning experiences for Sun from freeing StarOffice or Solaris?

Well, I think there are learning experiences, and not negative ones. Indeed, talking with Jono, he's been keen to impress upon me that it once seemed to be difficult for developers to contribute to Sun-sponsored projects. So it's a pleasure to read this piece from a leading light in OpenSolaris community, Peter Tribble, on his ease of contributing back to OpenSolaris.

In a word: blinding.

*No offence Z, you're a prince amongst men in my book.

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