Monday January 09, 2006 More Thaw: OpenSolaris does Mono
Today's "big thaw" item will shock some, but Erast Benson posted on the OpenSolaris forums yesterday with news that he's got Mono working on the Nexenta distribution of OpenSolaris. He's posted a screenshot to prove it.
So where is all this thawing coming from? We've seen Sun contributing widely and consistently to what most people call "Linux". We've seen NetBeans get Derby support, Eclipse get Glassfish support, NetBeans get the ability to deploy on IBM's proprietary Websphere. And now we see Mono running on OpenSolaris (whatever you think about Mono, which is another subject entirely).
I'll tell you where it's coming from! This is the freedom that free and open source software is all about. Once you open the source code so that anyone can do what they want with it, they do! All the other things that make up F/OSS are just the enablers, and we spend way too much of our energy arguing about them to the point where it gets transparently religious. The real test of open source is whether we see "dividing walls of hostility" being breached or built.
When people build those walls, that's proprietary behaviour, whether it's the actions of a vendor like Sun or IBM or the actions of an open source community. When people innovate unexpectedly around a body of source code, you can tell by the fruit they are growing that it's actually open.
Update: David Berlind has pointed to some of the entries in this series calling them "NetBeans momentum builders". But that's not what they are. I'm not (in this context anyway) being partisan, as today's entry shows. Rather, my point is that believing the only dynamic is a competitive one misses the whole point of open source.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 09 2006, 03:22:00 AM PST )
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