Ian Murdock wrote:
> All right.
>
> I don't even know where to begin.
I don't think anyone disputes that there is a lot of good being
overshadowed by a few small decisions that have large impact.
I just don't get why it would have been so bad for the binaries
shipped this week to be labeled as "Project Indiana Developer
Preview", and then wait a few weeks to let the trademark/branding
guideline project finish their guidelines and to let the community
try out Project Indiana first. You would have most likely gotten
to the same endpoint of releasing a binary distro named OpenSolaris
in March, but without appearing to be heavily handed in dictating these
decisions, alienating members of the community, and filling our mailboxes
to overflowing. (Just imagine the cost to Sun of all the bandwidth
and storage being wasted by this unnecessary flamefest.)
> Does it matter that we are inviting the community to participate
> in a discussion about how to enable broader use of the OpenSolaris
> brand, to build out a ecosystem of distributions that are compatible,
> to solve the Linux fragmentation problem before it even becomes
> a problem? What other company has done this? Shouldn't we be applauded
> for being willing to take this step--or is this just another
> case of Sun being held to a much different standard than everyone else?
No, it doesn't matter if you're inviting the community to participate
in a discussion, and then unilaterally declare the decision made by
Sun, before the community has finished reaching a decision on those
guidelines. Was the community process going so slowly after only a
couple of weeks that it was necessary to short-circuit it?
If Sun was being held to the same standard as everyone else, we'd be
removing Project Indiana binaries from the website right now for misuse
of the trademark outside the established guidelines published on
OpenSolaris.org.
> Or is all that insignificant, irrelevant? We haven't given everything,
> so therefore we've given nothing?
Maybe you should go have a long talk with Sun's Chief Open Source Officer,
who explained to many of Sun's engineers working on open source projects
a few weeks ago the highly non-rational, but repeatedly proven rule of
dealing with open source communities:
Control and influence are inversely proportional.
The more control you try to take, even over things like the name that you
may consider less significant, the less influence you will have with the
members of the community.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
