[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Jim Grisanzio]

Joerg Schilling wrote:
> 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.
>   

hey ...

Sure. Good point. And even though our source was available on campus the 
license was far too restrictive to do any good. Bottom line: we left the 
universities because we were closed and we lost out. Now we're open and 
we're going back. Nice thing about universities is that they attract 
young people and they make new graduates all the time. Every year, in 
fact, and in some countries they are making them in large numbers. It 
just takes a little time, that's all. Some of this is probably happening 
organically, but Sun is investing a lot in hundreds of Campus 
Ambassadors and in various other university-oriented programs and 
there's big movement in China and India already. The Western world will 
come along in due time.

As far as the "old SunOS community" you cite, I'm not sure it exists in 
any great numbers. It's there, surely, but I'm talking about the 
construction of a new and global community based mostly on new users. 
And I do think the OpenSolaris community has to be actively re-built, 
and that's a position I've had from the beginning. We started four years 
ago from pretty much nothing, which is why I have little tolerance for 
the belly-aching from the sidelines about how we supposedly don't have a 
community and how we basically suck around here. Bullshit. We have a 
community. It's small but growing. We set out to build something, and we 
are still building. We've done an outstanding job. I know that 
"building" word may not fit in the open source world, but I can usually 
find active building in most so-called "organic" efforts. Someone is 
investing resources somewhere to do something, even if those resources 
are widely distributed and not from only one company such as in our 
case. I think it's a balance, that's all.


>> 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. 

Some parts are difficult, sure, but others aren't. I think the docs guys 
are more than welcoming over there. Alan in the past was actively 
looking for help on the site but got no takers. And I'm always reading 
in blogs or finding list posts about people contributing. It's mixed. 
It's spotty. It's not all collected in one place for people to point to 
and it's certainly not a massive level of contributions that it's 
obvious for people to see. I'm not saying it's ok, but I also don't 
think it's impossible either. And this brings up a good point about 
language: we have to stop going to extremes when we describe 
OpenSolaris. I think sometimes Sun in media conversations tens to gloss 
over things from a 10K foot level (which only leads uninvolved observers 
to think that everything's great in here), and I think some community 
members (either Sun or non-Sun) go way over to the other end and say 
it's just a disaster. Neither is true for the vast majority of the 
project. We need to build from the middle /out/ to the edges, not from 
either edge /in/. In other words, let's knock off thing we /can/ do and 
not get paralyzed by all the stuff we /can't/ do.

> 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.....
>   

I think the Summit will be a great venue to drop the rhetoric, pick up a 
beer, and just talk and bang out some things we can /do/. As far as the 
mud is concerned, things have been much more civil lately and I hope 
that continues. Good /will/ be generated next week, and we have to carry 
that back into the community and get it on these lists and then come 
together at the next summit or conference or user group meeting and 
re-generate and repeat. We have to create a little culture and some 
traditions around OpenSolaris, and that really hasn't developed yet. It 
will.


>> 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. 
>   

I think for the main development issues it's best that they live here on 
os.org since that's where the largest number of engineers are. However, 
I'd very much like to see other related projects (distros, apps, etc) 
develop and distribute globally. We shouldn't think in terms of one 
community any more. We are part of a community of communities.

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