"Garrett D'Amore" <gdamore at sun.com> wrote:
> Not as big a change as you think. Remember the whole opensolaris distro
> and naming fiasco? And personally, my opinions haven't changed that
> much. I like open source and open development, but I like having a job
> with a regular paycheck more.
I believe that now is a really good time to revice the naming decision and
move e.g. towards a name like "Oracle OpenSolaris"
> Oracle holds the keys to the gate. And largely it holds the code
> ownership. The amount of community contributed code to ON is
> *miniscule*. The biggest contributions from the community have not been
> in code, or docs, but in facilitation of user groups and such. And
> ultimately, those efforts don't require anything more than access to the
> code.
The amount of code contributed by the commumity is much larger than the amount
of code integrated into ON and similar consolidations. This is not a result of
the missing will of the people from the cummunity outside of Sun/Oracle but a
result of the way of cooperating....
Garret, from your bio on Linkedin you entered Sun in 2007, so you did not
attend the OpenSolaris Summit in Santa Clara in September 2004 where we
discussed the way cooperation between people inside Sun and people outside Sun
should be done. Let me give a short summary on what happened around September
14th 2004:
There have been aprox. 440 Sun developers (employees) and three people from the
OSS community in the old Santa Clara town hall that now is on the Sun campus.
The Sun employees have been selected from the really old ones including people
like Bill Shannon, people like Andy Tucker and young ones (first come first
serve). There was a bigger demand than seats in the town hall.
The people from the OSS community have been Roy Fielding, the guy from Apple
who started Mac OS X as an underground project (sorry I forgot the name but I
could spend half an hour with digging though old mail if someone is interested
in the name) and me.
We had long discussions on what needs to be done in order to have a close
collaboration between people inside and people outside Sun. There was a
definite statement on that the way Apple throughs code over the fence is not
what Sun likes to happen with OpenSolaris. There have been very enthusiastic
proposals by the upper Sun management that was present in the Santa Clara
town hall.
In the evening of the first day, there was a dinner with aprox. 50 people payed
by Glenn Weinberg where I had a long discussion with Andy Tucker on the license
to use for OpenSolaris. At the second day (September 14th) the OpenSolaris
pilot started and was announced on a press release. A week later, the people
from the pilot had access to the code that has been reviewed so far.
On November 30th 2004 (IIRC) the first CDDL draft was published to the pilot.
The current CDDL license text includes three changes initiated by me and
discussed with Andy Tucker and Claire Giordano from Sun on a long phone
conference.
On December 3rd 2004, I proposed to have an OpenSolaris constitution and an
OpenSolaris "steering board".
OpenSolaris was a really ecxiting enterprise in 2004 and 2005 and the
collaboration between the people from inside Sun and the pilot did work really
good.
You may know that after some time, Roy Fielding left the OpenSolaris community
as he was disappointed from the missing progress in collaboration. I
intentionally stayed as I am aware of the fact that only people who are "in"
may change things....
I see the fact that Oracle did buy Sun as a challenge for fixing mistakes from
the past. If we manage it to get a real collaboration, the reputation of Oracle
will grow. If we are not successful, the reputation of Oracle in the general
OSS community will go down and I expect that this will affect Oracles sales
too.
Let us demonstrate that OSS and business in a big project like OpenSolaris can
coesist.
> So far, I think the experiment of deriving value out of the community
> has failed. Sun tried, hard. IMO, it failed, and was ultimately
> acquired as a result. I don't know the numbers, but I'd be surprised if
> the cost to Sun to run the Open Solaris project was not far in excess of
> any revenue or other benefit it realized as a result of those efforts.
The collaboration did not really happen yet. Let us start the experiment now...
I hope that the new OGB will get the opportunity to talk to the Oracle managers
in order to find the way that help to continue OpenSolaris not the way it was
run on the past but the way it was planned in 2004.
I expect that disappointed people from the OpenSolaris community may start a
fork. If this happens, Oracle may be in a worse situation that I expect
in case that a well defined collaboration between the "ourside community" and
people from Oracle is established.
> How many people in the community purchased Sun hardware because of
> OpenSolaris? I'd wager the number is pretty small, but I don't have any
> concrete numbers to back it up. I bet Larry Ellison does, though. (Did
> anyone here buy one of the Toshiba laptops preloaded with OpenSolaris?
> Did the existence of the preloaded OpenSolaris product influence that
> decision?)
We did for the Berlios successor platform... we did buy a whole 19" rack full
of machines.
J?rg
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