Joerg Schilling wrote:
You are correct: without OpenSourcing Solaris, Sun would have been in trouble
earlier.
What evidence do you have for this? I know there have been externally
sourced code contributions, but how much of it needed source rather than
the stable ABIs, and how material is it really? More to the point - what
revenue did it generate?
So you can answer your question "I'm not sure how the open sourcing
was successful for Sun shareholders." with a _yes_, as it helped to raise the
Sun stock price.....
Very briefly, yes, but since then I think it hasn't materially helped
shift anything that generated revenue for Sun, and Sun's stock hardly
trended up on its recent improving quality.
I further believe that a closer collaboration with the cummunity (as intended
by Sun in September 2004) would have given the additional momentum for Sun to
push it into the win zone for a longer time.
Well you can believe that, but belief in that is behind a lot of the
open source hype, and one thing that's hard to find is concrete evidence
of how it translated into a sound business plan and revenue.
This is however a lost chance and we cannot roll back time...
Indeed, but we can try to learn from it, and I think questioning how and
when open source is helpful to a technology creator is worthwhile.
Sun's position was fundamentally different to Red Hat and post-NetWare
SUSE, since they owned the things they were giving away, and had done
most of the development (or had paid for it).
I think its worth considering what they could have done differently and
why. I can't help thinking that they would have had a better chance by
going in completely the other direction and using their grip on Java and
Open Office (and mysql, eventually) to try to cut off Linux's air supply
and stunt its datacentre growth until Solaris on X64 could get a decent
foothold, but its all conjecture, and it would have accepted handing a
potential short-term gain to Microsoft.
James
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
