Safe as Milk

Sun and trust

June 7, 2006 2:57 pm Dave Neary gnome

Luis: Danese Cooper and Duncan Davidson (in the comments) have both written on the dynamics on Sun, which mean that managers are typically more interested in representing the interests of their teams to higher management, rather than the other way around.

Personally, I wish I had worked for more companies like that (I did work for Informix at one stage, where we had internal politics like that, and it was great to work there. Until they laid everyone off and sold cheap to IBM. Anyway…) – all too often, the lower down you are on the ladder, the further your orders are removed from reality – decision makers colour company strategy with their personal agenda, and you get a really funky view of the world from down there.

So yes, in big companies there is a lot of mistrust in the outside world. People talk about source code and “intellectual property” being the family jewels, and if you work in a company where a high level manager says “it’s not possible – you just can’t do that”, then that’s an issue that takes time to sort out.

And honestly, I’m now willing to give Sun the benefit of the doubt. Yes, OpenSolaris is under an MPL-alike licence and isn’t GPL compatible, for no particularly good reason that I know. But it’s still a free software licence, and that’s a huge advance on before.

(edit: Firefox/MPL comparison removed – Firefox is mostly dual licenced GPL/MPL)