SunMink

Simon Phipps's other Weblog
(a WebMink in the Sun)

OSO - A Milestone on Sun's Journey

Today in 2005 we've reached a milestone. Sun's stated direction is to use an open source model for all its software, and it's become necessary to have a formal co-ordination point for all this activity. So today Sun created a new "Open Source Office" (OSO) to act as the meeting-point for all its open source activities. It's not the first time we've had full-time staff devoted to the care and nurture of open source activity - my good friend Danese Cooper did this for several years before her recent job switch, for example - but having a cross-functional, cross-Sun Open Source Office with a Chief Open Source Officer at its helm is new. I'm thrilled to have the chance to play that role.

There is one innovation, though. OSO will host Sun's new Open Source Ombudsman. If you're worried Sun is acting in a way that's bad for the open source community-of-communities, you can write to the Ombudsman - ombudsman at sun dot com - and one of the community leaders in Sun's open source community will impartially and confidentially handle the e-mail and take the necessary steps to escalate the issue and work on your behalf.

There are sadly some who will be surprised to realise this, but Sun has been doing community-based development for all its life. Right from the start with BSD Unix and Bill Joy, up to the most recent developments with OpenSolaris and more, much of the software development Sun has done has involved community-visible, "open room" development of some sort. It's been so much a part of so many projects that it's just been taken for granted, like system test or documentation.

Since the term "open source" was popularised back in 1998, more and more of that "open room" development has become Open Source development, scattered throughout the company. Each project is unique - different people working on different code in different ways with different communities. When Sun's open source projects have spoken, it's sometimes been clear that they're working in different ways, sometimes with philosophical outlooks as different as they could be while remaining open source.

The new OSO is not about centralisation and control - Sun's internal open source communities would just work round that. Rather, it's about bringing leaders together so they can influence each other, promote best practice (avoiding license proliferation, for example) and behave in a relatively co-ordinated way in the outside world. Each community will still do its own thing - the Sun engineers working on Derby at Apache for example will not have the same culture and goals as the Sun engineers working on GNOME - but the internal community, a microcosm of the full open source community-of-communities, can use peer pressure to weed out the occasional accidental cluelessness of its members.

So that's the plan. The lightest touch possible to bring all Sun's many and diverse open source activities together to form an internal community, for the good of both Sun and the wider open source meta-community. Not itself the destination, just another milestone on Sun's journey.

Posted by webmink ( Aug 18 2005, 03:11:51 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [7]