Мартин Бохниг (Martin Bochnig) wrote:
No, you are missing the point.
The idea was to provide a free and open AllInOne A to Z software
platform stack, that would be able to compete with LinUX and to win
the OS battle.
Then that was a mind-numbingly stupid strategy - because:
a) it would take so long that Sun would be out of business first (oh,
look ...)
b) I'm not sure that's what customers really want
c) having the best free stack is pointless without revenue
This would have increased hardware sales and sales of
service/maintenance/support contracts.
So - we've given up trying to be like Microsoft, let's try and be like
Red Hat?
The difference, however, is massive: look at how much IP Sun created,
and how much Red Hat create. Red Hat are canny in employing high profile
(and high influence) Linux hackers, but how much do they actually fix or
write? They look good on stats next to other Linux collaborators, but
next to Sun's Solaris investment?
If you want Solaris to be Linux then say so. To me, a good
differentiator was that Sun had leadership, authority, and resources.
And you need those things to avoid tinkering on the periphery, and to
enable doing hard or just nasty stuff. Unfortunately, two of those
things seem to have caused what some people think is an epic fail in
community engagement. Trouble is, I'd rather Sun had those things and
could drive Solaris than that they became great community members and
mere peers.
To you, maybe Open Solaris is an opportunity to play at being an OS
provider. But to an OS user like me it was a way to observe the process
and see what's coming - and get an affordable and reasonably current
release based on the observation rather than marketing getting feature
complete for an 'industrial' release. Whether or not source code was
available to anyone outside Sun is largely irrelevant to me *providing*
the binary bits are available in a way that would enable repackaging in
a way like Belinix or Nexenta, which do provide refreshing alternatives
of approach. I do think there's plenty of value to be had from openness
that doesn't cede control or even necessarily expose sources - its just
a shame that there has been some severe issues with expectation
management and/or execution in the case of Open Solaris.
There the cash would have come from.
See, how IBM makes a living?
I don't see DB2 or AIX or the OS/400 or mainframe stuff being free.
Sure, IBM sell services too, but they don't give away their IP. Looks
like they're happy to milk Sun's tho.
I'm not saying you can't make a moderate open source business selling
services on Other People's Stuff. I'm concerned about what happens when
you're the main author, and carry all the R&D costs, and all the
pre-market investment risk. Bear in mind that the time delay between
the engineering investment and the development technology risk both
conspire to mean that you have to get a big return to pay for that R&D -
and if the stuff is free then the other guys you've let into the playing
field as peers don't have those costs or risks to recoup. Or you can
embrace the emperor's new clothes and develop in the open, and lose
control and any USP.
Maybe Sun could have gone all out for community and given up control -
and fired 90% of their engineers to reduce costs in line with a new
business model where they're packagers and Innovation Happens Elsewhere?
Is that really what you wanted? Could that build ZFS? Java? Its usually
bad enough having bike shed discussions internally.
Sometimes authoritative leadership with resources is necessary - compare
and contrast the Debian ecosystem before and after Mr Shuttleworth's
intervention.
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