I do believe that having Solaris open sourced does benefit Sun through partners and developers. The tricky part is that Sun needs to make money from having its crown jewels open sourced.
Apple's MacOS X builds on Darwin and is able to be benefit from features ported to BSD, such as Dtrace and ZFS. And one could say that Apple is the most successful UNIX desktop today, because they figured out how to differentiate themselves from the others.. have a better desktop and apps to go with it! I'd even say that Sun could stand to learn a lot from Apple on how to monetize open source and closed source software:) When it comes to Linux, giving them our code does little to benefit Sun. Even if OpenSolaris were dual licensed, it wouldn't cause a massive migration of users or developers from the Linux camp. I hope Sun employees are not kidding themselves on this one. It would obviously benefit companies such as RedHat, IBM, and Novell who would have the funds to port components from OpenSolaris into Linux. They could charge a premium for support. How does this benefit Sun or the OpenSolaris community? For users, the choice will be simple.. "why switch to OpenSolaris, when the features I want will be in Linux?". For people to switch, there has to be a significant differentiation that forces people to want to climb the learning curve. Unfortunately, that has more to do with flashy desktops and less to do with real technical features these days. It would be better for Sun to put more effort around building our community. The best place for Sun to start is to target colleges, universities, start-ups, and the embedded consumer market. Doing that will increase the developer community and thusly the user community. Doing that does not require any licensing changes, just good old fashion marketing and funding. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Systems Engineer http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/sysadmin/ http://unixconsole.blogspot.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Akhilesh Mritunjai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, May 19, 2008 3:02:39 PM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] The ZFS inventor and Linus sitting in a tree? Sorry, a bit bitter, but if Sun Inc. is going to GPLfy ZFS, they might as well liquidate and go home. If anybody has made money on Linux it's IBM! If ZFS goes to Linux, long IBM and short JAVA - just like Sun made pittance on Java, OpenOffice and Solaris - it will continue to make pennies. However, IBM will support it on zSeries and pSeries and sell Hardware + Linux licenses AND services by the buckets. Sun! Listen. IBM is eating your lunch, not Linux. If you give it your garrison, you'd be out of food this winter! Any suggestions on what's the next best thing ? The Register says Windows Server 2008 is shaping up nicely... anybody got a torrent ? - Akhilesh "over-reacting" Mritunjai This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected] _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
