Wednesday January 26, 2005 Solaris, Tequila and Tolerance
I spent a comfortable evening yesterday in the company of the team that just launched OpenSolaris as they sipped tequila in various forms and enjoyed a few brief hours of down-time. There was a buzz of excitement in the room as we watched the website gathering page-views, and we spent quite a bit of time reading comments and reactions. It was very interesting to note that the traffic coming in to the site from news organisations was negligible - they amounted for less than 1% of the traffic, compared with Slashdot which drew 1000s of visitors.
So what have people said about it all? I remember commentators saying Sun would never open source Solaris, that if it did the license wouldn't be OSI approved, that all the best bits like DTrace would be ring-fenced, that there would be no real external involvement, and so on. Well, they were all wrong. It's open as in open, free as in speech as well as beer and it's started by releasing the crown jewels of Solaris 10 as the earnest - see Bryan's piece on DTrace for more.
So what will people complain about now? Well, as usual Steven Vaughan-Nichols of eWeek is the spokesman for the competition and the leader of the (many) journalistic naysayers who can't just bring themselves to admit Sun might have done a good thing. He gathers together comment from all the people least likely to have a positive word about the news and comes to the conclusion that OpenSolaris won't attract a community. Just to show how far over the edge SJVN and his usual suspects are, take a look at Groklaw, where Pamela Jones has written a long, thoughtful and balanced analysis of the news. It is the opposite of the trade press shallowness.
Pamela is of course a self-confessed "GPL girl" and so was never going to be happy with any other license, but her view is extremely positive and encouraging when you make an allowance for that. She is positive about Sun taking good steps forward and rightly notes that the people involved are just trying to do what they know is right. That's always a learning process. Anyone who claims to have "made it" is plain wrong - I have seen the OpenSolaris team change course multiple times as they have seen the implications of their actions or received comments like those Pamela and marbux kindly contributed. If only more folk in the GNU/Linux community were as positive and open.
However, I continue to disagree with assertions that Sun will have no community around OpenSolaris. That assertion fails to recognise two things:
- First, OpenSolaris, like GNU/Linux, is not a community, it is a community of communities. In fact it's an overlapping community of communities - both meta-communities have things like Gnome in common. When you actually do the counting you find that there are already vast numbers of developers who are part of the OpenSolaris meta-community.
- Second, as Ben Rockwood has already ably explained, this is not the creation ex nihilo* of communities for the parts of the OpenSolaris community that are Solaris specific. Sun has been employing a large number of engineers for many years to create and maintain those, and components like DTrace start life with as many contributors and supporters as most of the open source elements I have seen.
Each element within the OpenSolaris meta-community starts on day one with sufficient contributors to make it a powerful force for good, and the true openness we'll see evolving at OpenSolaris.org will provide plenty of scope for others to contribute and be recognised for so doing. Pamela says "in Open Source, size matters". The OpenSolaris community is plenty big enough several months before it fully launches.
The underlying issue really boils down to one that's much older - it's the battle between the GPL purists and the OSI pragmatists. Pamela says:
But the problem is, bottom line, that when they say "the Open Source community" in their press release, they don't mean Linux. When I say "Open Source community," I do. ... The problem I still see is that Sun wants to drop the F and run its own race with the OSS part, defining it in their own narrow way, and by dropping the F I mean not accepting the GPL.When Sun says "the Open Source Community" it means the meta-community of all projects using OSI-approved licenses and not, as Pamela does, the GNU/Linux fan-club. Sun's definition it not the narrow one - for example, OpenOffice.org uses LGPL so Sun finds the GPL perfectly acceptable in the cases where it's the right license - and describing it so is projection. Sun has been a strong supporter of the inclusive OSI approach (we even have an employee on the OSI board) and engages widely with with the open source meta-meta-community.
Sun has already "gone the whole hog" by totally embracing the OSI approach and incrementally and responsibly applying it retrospectively to the software catalogue, at great expense and not a little risk. Maybe the real need is for the GPL purists to be more accepting of the OSI approach and join the world of tolerant pragmatists, as this Slashdot poster says. Sun's shifted and is still listening and learning. How about you?
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Posted by webmink
( Jan 26 2005, 10:47:50 AM PST )
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