Wednesday November 30, 2005 We're Giving Everything Away
Today's big news from Sun is that we're giving everything in our server-side software portfolio away free of charge - we're confident you'll like it all so much you'll buy our service and support packages, but there's no catch and no risk if you don't. The new Solaris Enterprise System incorporates Sun's complete software stack, and it's all available as a no-cost download. You'll remember we did the same with the Solaris 10 operating system before we open sourced it to make OpenSolaris, and this is the next step in our move into being a Participation Age software and systems company. Charging for binaries is so last millennium!
Inside-Out
My friend and colleague Jim Grisanzio was the person who first alerted me to an idea he eloquently develops in a recent posting about Community Managers. He said back at the start of the year that communities aren't something you message and control from the outside, they are something you join and influence from the inside. He's moving on now to talk of the dynamics of how one moves from an "us & them" mentality to an "it's all us" approach, and further to consider how collaborative communities are the only way one can work in a global, participative market.
One of the things the OpenSolaris community really had going for it from the start was that, pre-opening, there was already a distributed, collaborative community working on the Solaris source. On opening day, we weren't creating a new community outside Sun, or sending a few Sun staff out to join something. We were opening the doors so that anyone with the will and the skill could become part of the (now Open-)Solaris community.
Not every group is like that. As I discuss the future with various groups inside Sun, this is one of my diagnostics for how well-prepared a team's thinking is for going open source. The folk who are worried about "running programs to draw in the community", "crafting messages", "sending our engineers out to the community" and so on are the ones most likely to find the transition to open source hard. Hearing people talk about "the community" as something "out there" is diagnostic of pre-Participation Age thinking that will need to evolve.
