Friday December 23, 2005 The Heart of Open Source
Must one exploit in order to support? I've noticed people accusing Sun of not supporting "Linux", yet I've discovered (somewhat to my surprise, actually) that despite the fact Sun is hardly at the head of the pack of those exploiting GNU/Linux distributions, we are in fact a key contributor to all of them.
My attention was first drawn to this fact by the work that Glynn Foster does in the GNOME community, but the announcement of X11R7.0 was very enlightening. Not only is a Sun engineer at the heart of the community, but Sun is also hosting the upcoming X.Org conference.
As I have dug deeper I've found that hundreds of Sun staff are quietly going about the job of improving a whole raft of technologies that are key to GNU/Linux, not so Sun can make a fast buck from Linux hype (like some I could name) but because working on the community code is the right way to go about doing things for all Sun's customers, be they GNU/Linux or Solaris customers (yes, we do in fact sell and support both). It's just The Way It's Always Been Done at Sun.
For many people, all the software they see in a day on a typical GNU/Linux desktop is being actively maintained, at least in part, by Sun engineers (let's not even start on the server side). Sun employs people who are committers in GNOME, X.Org, Perl, Mozilla and many other packages that are central to whole Unix desktop experience in all its many flavours (*BSD, Fedora, SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX and so on). Without Sun's support in employing the engineers involved, there might be no accessibility in GNOME, no internationalisation in Mozilla. And of course, OpenOffice.org still depends heavily on Sun's direct support. We're obviously not the only contributor. But we'd be missed if we weren't there.
People accusing Sun of not supporting "Linux" are usually making a partisan point that misses the main strength of the free/open source movement - bringing together diverse interests to collaborate over what does not differentiate them from one another. People working to improve the commons we all share are supporting us all, regardless of what they are actually selling.
