[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Joerg Schilling]

Jim Grisanzio <Jim.Grisanzio at Sun.COM> 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 

Try to think about a different view. It may be that Sun missunderstands _why_
the OpenSolaris community already works. Understanding why the current 
community works could help to speed up the growth of this community and it
would result in a better OpenSolaris soon.


> 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 am not sure if it is a good idea to listen to these people. Many of these
people are from the "lost generation" (see explanataion below). 

> 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.

SunOS had a community 20 years ago already, when Linux did not exist.
There is no need to *build* a community but there is a need to foster an 
existing community. If you use a defilibrator on a person with a beating
heart, you may kill that person. If you try to create a community although 
there is a community, you may kill the existing community.

Sun did make to major mistakes in the past. 

1) the desktop was "forgotten" in favor of mainframe, but if you ignore
	the desktop, you lose visibility and visibility is important if
	you like to get new customers.

2) the opensource and university strategy was run as if there was no Linux.
	There was Solaris source in the universities but the students did
	not know this. Before they asked other people, they searched the
	internet and found Linux. This created a university generation 
	that used Linux instead of Solaris for daiyly work and research.
	These people are now the decision makers that buy Linux related
	stuff. This is why I call this generation a "lost generation".
	You will not get these people back with a reasonable amount of
	effort. Even worse: listening to these people has a high potential
	of losing the old SunOS community that still exists.


> 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/
>
This tries to discuss a blog that tries to make the missing accessibility of
the source control system guilty for problems. This is not the real problem.
The real problem is that effort from the existing OpenSolaris community 
is ignored and that it is close to impossible to contribute. But this is not
a technical problem, it is a problem caused by burocracy rules that prevent 
collaboration. This does not only slow down the cooperation with external
development but it even slows down things inside Sun.

Given the fact that there have been several attempts to discuss these problems
in OpenSolaris mailing lists that all ended up in mudslinging, I propose to
discuss this at a face to face discussion next weekend.....


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

The CDDL was no mistake. It see no attempt from the Sun upper management 
to find out where problems with collaboration with the community are. 
This seems to be a mistake.....

What we need is that the right people inside Sun accept that there is a 
OpenSolaris community that is willing to contribute and that there needs to be
a supporting infrastructure for this inside Sun. This does not mean technology
but people! 

Claiming that collaboration with OpenSolaris can only happen on the 
OpenSolaris.org portal is a mistake. This is an attempt to patronize the 
community. 

As with the defilibrator, first listen to the heart beats and do not try to
create something that already exists. 

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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