[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Jason J. W. Williams]

I think the T'so's attacks on OpenSolaris' slowness to adopt a
distributed SCM, and the sponsor model for changes are a bit unfair.
Linux's developmen has always been in the open and has had the benefit
of evolving from one open method of contribution to another. They've
never had to deal with the challenge of moving a project the size of
Solaris from closed source contribution practices into the community.
There's more work to be done, but the strides have been pretty amazing
to be honest.

Coming from a Linux history, and running both Linux and OpenSolaris at
the moment in production service, the quality of OpenSolaris is much
higher in terms of reliability. Maintaining that quality while opening
maximally to contributions has got to be a tricky road.

-J

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 4:46 PM, 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
>  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
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