Fun in the Corporate World

August 22, 2006 1:48 am General

Ahh yes, it’s lovely to see a bit of life back in the corporate world, IBM bashing Sun over OpenSolaris and Sun mocking HP among the notable ones last week. Bring it on.

However, I guess I was slightly disappointed to see the response from various Sun people. I can absolutely appreciate that OpenSolaris is everyone’s baby, and those people involved can be really proud of the long hours they have put into it, but I think there’s a lot of value to be learned from Dan’s comments. While I don’t agree with some of the points he made, it’s one perception of what others may think about the project and something that we should take as constructive feedback, however aggressive those comments are.

The truth is, there may never be another open source project like Linux, that caught on as quickly as it did. There was an obvious gap in the market and the project was still very early in development. Sun, and OpenSolaris, may well have missed that specific gap. However, do I think that there’s no room for OpenSolaris? Hell no, and the various innovative features [DTrace, BrandZ, Zones, SMF, FMA] that have gone into Solaris 10 is a good reminder of that. Choice is good. Building a community over night to the same fit as the current Linux community was always going to be hard. You have to find your niche. Ubuntu found it by providing regular 6 monthly releases tracking the latest and best code the open source community could offer, and provided a mechanism for a much wider distribution. It’s a challenge that I’m sure the OpenSolaris community will take up.

Dan’s right, the code is still stored behind the firewall. Yes, that *is* a problem that we need to fix. However, in a rather weird twist, that’s one of the things that Sun got right. As frustrating as it currently is to push back code [and really you should be talking to one of the people who have done this from outside], it gave the opportunity to discuss what development model works best for *everyone*, not just those internal to Sun. Better still, we got the people writing the code for the various distributed SCM’s to get involved in the discussion about which one to use. It’s nice to see open collaborative progress.

Rich Green described OpenSolaris as a run-away success. While he may have been talking about numbers of contributions or adoptions, I’d like to think it was the fact that we’re trying for the first time to encourage our 1000’s of Sun engineers to interact with a wider community, working towards a common goal. That’s not an easy thing to do – you wouldn’t believe how many people don’t completely grok open source development. I’m absolutely sure you’ll see the very same in just about every company developing proprietary software, including IBM. But that’s the fun part, and certainly makes my life more interesting.

Thanks for the feedback Dan!

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