[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Jim Grisanzio]

We seem to be in some blogs and on Slashdot recently -- and not 
necessarily in nice ways.

There are many things in these blogs below I disagree with, but when you 
spend the time to dig through them you are left with the realization 
that we as a community are not well understood -- at best. :) For those 
of us involved in this project, we certainly know we are behind in some 
key ares, but it seems that others are using that fact to continually 
hit us instead of getting involved and helping out or at least rooting 
us on from the sidelines. Also, we are doing some great things here as a 
community, and that's not getting out nearly as much as it should. Why?

OpenSolaris has been knocked around many times in our three years of 
life, and I've always said that the knocks would continue until we built 
a community -- something that is obvious and could not be denied. 
Perhaps I was wrong. I think we have built a community, but perhaps it's 
not obvious or easily seen. Or perhaps it's still too soon and the 
community is still too small. Perhaps we are not open enough and our 
community doesn't contribute enough. I don't know. What do you guys 
think? Also, the first link below is from Matt Asay, who writes about 
the difficulty of doing community development on company-sponsored 
projects. I think he brings up a good issues there. We are being 
compared to other open source communities and falling short when in 
reality the comparison itself is faulty to begin with. All open source 
communities are different, and we are one of the company-sponsored 
communities and everything about that is different.

The difficulty of building community around commercial: The OpenSolaris 
example
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9928690-7.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=NewsBlog

What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/04/19/what-sun-was-trying-to-do-with-open-solaris/

Ted Ts’o Dissects “What Sun was trying to do with OpenSolaris”
http://www.michaeldolan.com/1171

Jim
-- 
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris