Alan Cox wrote:
PS: Annd now, a "message from my sponsor". All can feel free to ignore
if they prefer: Sun is far and away the largest contributor to Open
Source of any institution, and including technology core to our products
I'll chuckle amusedly instead and point out that various independant
studies don't agree with you. Of course it all depends what you measure
and how you measure it.
Fair enough, Alan. If you want to say that the sources I can cite aren't
the final word, that's fine and we can argue over it if sufficiently
motivated. Which I'm not.
FWIW, to show I'm not pulling it out of my ear, I'm going by what I read
at
http://www.businessreviewonline.com/os/archives/2007/01/where_does_open.html
which links to
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf
(page 51 is handy) I believe these precede Sun open sourcing Java and
the Verilog source to our newest processors, and certainly predate
acquiring Innotek and MySQL, and a bunch of other things, so they
understate our contribution.
So, even I'm wrong (it has been known to happen) the claim isn't
vaporous. I recommend to anyone to look at the above links and see how
much larger our share is than the extremely distant runners-up
Yet, ....
Sun is a big contributor by all measurements however, and the final open
sourcing of Java stuff after about eight years of trying to explain to
Sun that if they wanted Java to succeed they were missing a trick or two
is great to see.
...yet however you slice it, and as you say, Sun is a big contributor.
Perhaps we should have open-sourced Java a long time ago - but
eventually we did. Sometimes it takes a long time to change opinions.
We all owe a debt to those in the FL/OSS movement who kept applying
pressure to make it happen.
Alan
Jeff
--
Jeff Savit
Principal Engineer
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Phone: 732-537-3451 (x63451)
400 Atrium Drive Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Somerset, NJ 08873 http://blogs.sun.com/jsavit/
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