I agree with that summary of real events and facts. Hence I decided to post everything inline:
http://www.michaeldolan.com/1102 Thursday, February 14th, 2008 “I told you so” in order? Roy Fielding resigns from OpenSolaris http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-February/004488.html In my opinion, Roy came up short in fully describing the issue, but he did a great job focusing on the thread at hand regarding OpenSolaris and trademark. The fact is, Sun is not an open source community or development player. Sun wants all the benefits of saying it’s all about open and freedom, yet, Sun does something completely different. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, the development is still behind the firewall inside Sun. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, open source community developers would have to get Sun engineers to agree to accept code. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, developers have to contribute copyright co-ownership to the corporation, Sun, in order to contribute to OpenSolaris. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, there are still essential parts of the Solaris OS that are still not opened under a free license (they call it the OpenSolaris Binary License… aka proprietary). I could go on and on… but let me refer to Roy’s view below. Will Ian be next to resign? I can’t believe he really believes this is the right execution of what sounded like an “open” strategy 2 years ago… I knew better, but many fell for the bedtime story that sounded sweet. Some will still argue that Sun’s great, open, etc., but they’re brainwashed; anyone who really knows what’s going on should not be fooled at this point in the game. “Open”Solaris is an OS that is created by 1 company, with no outside input or control and has a code repo on opensolaris.org… besides that, what has it done to contribute or help any community of users? Some choice quotes: Sun didn’t just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris; they made promises about it being an open development project. That’s the only way they could get someone like me to provide free labor for their benefit. Given Sun’s recent track record on breaking promises, another one doesn’t surprise me at all. … Most of the stuff in that letter about Sun’s responsibilities in regard to “International Trademark Law” is nothing more than snow being tossed in the eyes of technical folks who don’t have access to their own lawyers. … In fact, if it weren’t for the extremely pig-headed way in which Indiana was thrust on the community as Ian’s private domain, it could have easily been a unifying path for all of the distros. It could have given them a gate within OpenSolaris in which to collaborate, instead of doing all of their work in separate communities outside OpenSolaris. Indiana is just another private marketing team within Sun that is making private decisions about “OpenSolaris” that aren’t even in line with the internal processes of Solaris Engineering, let alone the published governance model of the OGB. … Sun agreed that “OpenSolaris” would be governed by the community and yet has refused, in every step along the way, to cede any real control over the software produced or the way it is produced, and continues to make private decisions every day that are later promoted as decisions for this thing we call OpenSolaris. Rather than be honest about it and restructure the community to correspond to this MySolaris style of over-the-wall development, Sun prefers to lie to the external community members while ignoring their input. … This well is poisoned; the company has consumed its own future and any pretense that the projects will ever govern themselves (as opposed to being governed by whatever pointy-haired boss is hiding behind the scenes) is now a joke. … There’s nothing particularly wrong with that choice — it is a perfectly valid open source model for corporations that don’t need active community participation. IMO, the resulting code tends to suck a lot more than community-driven projects, but it is still open source. In any case, I am done with it. I hereby resign my status as a Member of the OpenSolaris Community, effective immediately. 2010/4/5 Мартин Бохниг (Martin Bochnig) <[email protected]>: > James: For 3 pretty ROI-worthless aquisitions alone (Cobalt, STK and > MySQL) Sun's top-management spent 10 Billion USD (ten thousand > millions!!!). > Every time the behaved like kids: At hopelessly overheated markets - > instead of selling something - they bought! Obviously the paid way > overpriced amounts for much too little counter-valueadd. > > > If you closely watched the NYSE charts over the years you should know, > that these 10 Billions are more $$$, than Sun ever managed to generate > as a profit in all these years summed up. > > To me that appears to be more related to Sun's liquidity problems. > And those were indeed severe management faults at the HIGHEST levels. > > Other errors certainly include a pricing policy, where 5 years old > processors still stood on the price list at their launch prices (such > as something like 7995 USD for a 600MHz UltraSPARC III non-Cu module > for the Blade 2000). And were the option price for a simple stupid > generic IDE-DVD-ROM drive for the Blade 150 was 295 EUR on sun.de (at > least from 2003 till 2006). > > > You are blaming the wrong man! > I made this mistake myself for far too long. > > I agree with Joerg's statements below: Sun was not open enough. For > this reason substantial parts of real community-support were sent to > dust. While those parts of the community lost their trust ... > > (2007 ... Ian-Diana ... etc.) > > You forgot the trouble? > Reminder: http://www.michaeldolan.com/1102 > > Thursday, February 14th, 2008 > “I told you so” in order? Roy Fielding resigns from OpenSolaris > > > > Some choice quotes: > > Sun didn’t just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris; > they made promises about it being an open development project. That’s > the only way they could get someone like me to provide free labor for > their benefit. Given Sun’s recent track record on breaking promises, > another one doesn’t surprise me at all. > > > > > THAT was lost "share holder value". > > > > > %martin > > > > > On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 12:38 PM, James Mansion > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Simon Phipps wrote: >>>> >>>> Ths thing I find interesting in the article, and indeed in many of your >>>> statements, is that you show absolutely no sign of self-doubt about whether >>>> open sourcing everything you could actually destroyed shareholder value and >>>> drove Sun down the toilet. >>> >>> That's because it did not. See the penultimate paragraph of >>> http://webmink.com/2010/03/08/sundown/ >>> >>> >> >> I don't understand. I'm looking at 'we've achieved some amazing things ... >> despite the success of Sun's open source business, it still wasn't enough to >> rescue Sun'. >> >> That looks self-congratulatory to me, not doubting. I'm not sure how the >> open sourcing was successful for Sun shareholders. Definitely successful >> for Red Hat shareholders though. Where's the bit that says 'maybe embracing >> open source was a huge mistake and we screwed up'? Its one thing to embrace >> open source by consuming it, but embracing it by taking a huge IP investment >> and chucking over the wall? (Well, mostly ...) >> >> The whole strategy seems to have been predicated on 'the enemy of my enemy >> is my friend', presumably based on a massive chip-on-shoulder brought about >> by NT eating your market in CAD and financial workstations. >> >> Hopefully Larry's management team will see that there IS some market for a >> not-Windows alternative for PC-clone workstations and that the consistency, >> stability of interfaces and compatibility that defined Solaris are a >> differentiator that can make it more attractive to OEMs than Linux variants. >> But I'm not hopeful. >> >> James >> >> _______________________________________________ >> opensolaris-discuss mailing list >> [email protected] >> > _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
