On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 3:25 PM, John Sonnenschein <johnsonnenschein at gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 4:06 PM, W. Wayne Liauh <wp at hawaiilinux.us> wrote: > > Many of us came to Solaris because of Sun. In our drive to promote a > lower-entry-cost, more secure, more-or-less-open, alternative to the Windows > OS (we have been doing this for over a decade now), we have recently been > surprised to find Sun's name as our best selling point (vis-a-vis the various > strains of Linux) to draw interests to Solaris, or even to Linux. To our > corporate audiences, we have also found out that Solaris is also very closely > interwound with Sun's hardware (both Sparc and x86-based). Most CIOs are > wellread--it's a cutthroat market if you know what's going on; and their > obligation to explore energy efficient servers also prompts them to pay > attention to Solaris. > > > > In the long run (say, 5-10 years from now), of course, we (or should I > say, "I", as it is only MHO) would like to see the OpenSolaris community > attains a separate identity from Sun. But b/f Solaris, OpenSolaris, and > OpenSolaris derivatives--hopefully there will be many--acquire a substantial > market share, I believe we should exercise prudence and patience. The most > important business right now is to work together to find ways to expand the > market share. > > > But at what cost? > > I don't want to be free labour for Sun. That Sun is successful is good
Sun pays over a 1,000 people to work on Solaris. In addition, even if people were "free labour" as you are suggesting, it would be many, many years before Sun could break even on the cost of this project vs. that labour. > But if it's just going to be "do what sun wants" out of convenience > and the community isn't going to assert it's independence at all, > what's the point in calling it an "Open Source" community? It is then > no more open source than OSX. Bi-weekly code drops come over the wall > and we can all "ooh" and "ahh" over the new features that Sun's giving > us. First, Apple's open source licensing is nowhere near as liberal as the CDDL. Secondly, regardless of your view points, Sun is unequivocably far more open about the development of Solaris than Apple is about OS X. Third, Apple only released the source for a lot of things that were basically already publicly available. They keep their crown jewels tightly clasped to their chest (Aqua, etc.). Sun, by comparison, has shared all of the crown jewels of Solaris (DTrace, ZFS, SMF, etc.). I think Sun's actions have already proven that they are taking a viable, but long-term approach, that is far more open than Apple has ever done. Cheers, -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." - Robert Orben
