Monday February 14, 2005

Communities and diversity

Great piece by James Governer at Redmonk about the myth of a monolithic "open source community":

... there are many open source communities with their own licensing and governance approaches, lexicons, characters, superstars. Its a carnival mash-up, a diverse cornucopia of views attitudes and styles.

and:

So Sun wants Solaris to compete with Linux. Well that's what diversity is all about. That's where innovation comes from; competition.

Sun's own Simon Phipps also has a discussion about patents, licensing, and CDDL. He nicely captures the intent behind the licensing choice for OpenSolaris. Be skeptical if you want, but we really are sincere about wanting to build an open source community around OpenSolaris. Not to destroy Linux and the BSDs, but to join them. And, yes, to compete with them to create the best open source operating system.