> For the folks who *don't* work at Oracle (of which I > am now one), I > think your actions are actively destructive. At this > point, the > community needs Oracle more than Oracle needs the > community, and doing > anything which might drive Oracle to walk away from > this community is > destructive and ultimately such a result would be a > shame. > > -- Garrett
I would make a distinction between a community of external developers/active contributors and a community of users and enthusiasts. It's true that Oracle currently doesn't need the former. Can it afford to lose the later in the long run ? I don't think so since those are potential/current customers. All the IOUC conference calls and user groups talks show Oracle cares about that community. Since Oracle/Sun doesn't seem interested in effectively reaping the benefits of massive external participation (which translates in lots of small contributions in all areas and rarely huge ones), I can only wonder how does it view other 3rd-party companies selling systems and hardware running on top of OpenSolaris. It *feels* like the worst of both worlds: they still don't get huge contributions back and also lose money on hardware sales and support contracts. It's must be hard to quantify how much those contributions help compared to the losses. The same goes for the argument that keeping the OpenSolaris.org infrastructure running is too costly. We are probably never going to see any numbers so it's all guesswork and subject to speculation. Oracle has not inherited an easy situation here. The outlook for Solaris seem to be slowly shaping up. OpenSolaris still needs more attention. -- Giovanni -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ ogb-discuss mailing list ogb-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/ogb-discuss
