[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Rafael Vanoni]

Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> 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?

I guess it's easier to see the short comings than what we've been 
acomplishing. I was at FISL last week and during Ted Ts'o's talk asked 
him his opinion on OpenSolaris and technologies like DTrace and ZFS. He 
answered very neutrally, with the same opinions as he stated on his blog 
except for the negative remarks towards some aspects of the program.

> 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?

IMO, when we're compared to other big OSS projects, one of the things 
that stands out is the low % of patches submitted from developers 
outside Sun. Which I believe is the key point to Ted Ts'o's comments. 
When replying to my question at FISL, he said that having little 
contributions from outside Sun mean that OpenSolaris is not getting the 
benefits of open source development, which is a reasonable argument.

I don't know if the sole reason for low contributions is not having the 
gate out yet. That adds to it, but I think we still have ways to go in 
terms of getting developers in our code. I'm confident that 
OpenSolaris2008.05 will have a very positive impact here, as I believe 
having a solid distribution will bridge a huge gap.

So it just might be that these two gaps will be filled within very 
little time of one another and we'll have an even more interesting year.

In any case, I think the negative critics will continue to come because 
OpenSolaris is different than most OSS projects. Just like those other 
projects were bashed when no one understood their model.

I think we have a great community, roughly 60k to 90k in one year shows 
that even if you don't like numbers ;)

cheers
Rafael

> 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