On Fri, 15 Feb 2008, Roy T. Fielding wrote: > Sure, no worries -- I know you've put a lot more effort into this > project than others, and that earns quite a bit of merit in my mind.
I have put a lot into Solaris, and before I was working at Sun. Oddly, I am a lot like you actually, and I spent almost an entire year getting Sun to reverse a decision to indefinitely delay Solaris on the x86 platform. I didn't get paid a cent for it. Further more, those meetings almost fell apart several times, and many of the other folks were tossing in the towel as well...I stuck it out, and we have an x86 product today, in fact I see it as the main development platform, and both sparc and x86 are supported today. While I haven't worked on any superstar open source projects, I have worked at companies that specialized in open source, VA Linux Systems (VA Research when I was hired as a consultant) which I noted. But I also worked at Kerbango, one of the first embedded Linux projects that was a fair success, pulling a best innovation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, same year Tivo was awarded the same (2000 or 2001). Unfortunately, this project was shelved, but not before 3Com paid $80M (unfortunately not all to me:-() for an electronic radio developed by a handful of people, me being one of the leads. I consider that to be a success, and last acquisition of the dot-bomb. I know it's easy for folks to say that Sun doesn't get it, but there are other folks here that have similar history as me, in other projects, or involved in other open source projects Sun is working on. They do actually get it in many ways, so Sun gets the short end of the stick often. Star/OpenOffice, NFS, Grid, Java, there are a lot of software that is successful in open source that Sun has created and given to the community, as you know. I would like to take us back to Sun's poor execution of the statement which Bill Franklin sent to the OGB. As so common, this seems to have been handled poorly. Am I surprised? No, not really...but while many folks were reading between the lines, I think there is some info for us to glean at least some light on, and I'd like to toss an idea out, but first I would like to talk about one of the items which pertains to it. (only quoting first paragraph) ----------------------------------------- 1. International trademark law requires trademark owners to take certain specific actions to protect their brands, and the OpenSolaris trademark and brand is no different. The OpenSolaris trademark, as a mark derived from the Solaris trademark, belongs to Sun Microsystems Inc., and Sun must defend it or risk not only the OpenSolaris trademark, but the Solaris trademark as well. ----------------------------------------- This is a key point, IMO. What this says is that Sun is obligated to protect their Solaris trademark by insuring that OpenSolaris doesn't dilute their trademark which OpenSolaris is based on. This one point presents several hidden messages, but the community seems to have skipped over them in haste, reading other things into Sun's process and/or communication. I have pondered over this, and am not sure how it could effect Sun's position with a relicense of the OpenSolaris code, and I do not even know if/when they will license it, I am only going by public announcements which the CEO of Sun has made, and at JavaOne Jonathan commented that a relicense could be in the future, stay tuned...(I'm still staying tuned). I point this out, because I do not know how that will, or if it will even effect, the Solaris trademark. And most on these lists are not lawyers... With this said, to me it seems like this use over a name has caused a lot of haste in the community. The community is not saying Sun's code stinks, or that the engineers have done a poor job, the community is pointing their finger at Sun's management of this process and telling them how poorly it has been executed. I don't take the comments personally, because I'm an engineer and I see engineering as doing a fine job. The engineers are doing the same jobs they were doing before. Indiana is not a product yet, and as such, the IPS has not had to go through ARC. It will when it goes back, but it hasn't yet. We could debate that Sun should have worked with and gathered criteria from the community, but Indiana is a Sun products. It is not a mistake for Sun to use Indiana as a product, I fully support that. I have never supported the use of OpenSolaris as the name, since using "Open" implies it is for the community use. However, let's go back to the legal aspect, there seems to be a very good reason for Sun to do what they have done, I just wish they would have explained this a lot better so community people didn't need to read between the lines and come up with such harsh and hidden messages, yourself included. But I want to just consider for a moment that there could be other implications that Sun hasn't expounded upon to the community, and I feel we should at least give them a chance to do so. Now, here's my idea. To me it seems like in many ways we're just whining about using the OpenSolaris name, and as I have pointed out, there could be good reason for Sun to do that which was not outlined in the brief text. That single paragraph above carries a lot of weight, IMO, for Sun. What if we used OpenUNIX? When DEC opened VMS (yes I used DEC once upon a time, before it was Open), they called it OpenVMS. Solaris is really UNIX, and the world seems to know that UNIX pre-dated Linux, and that Linux is only a clone of UNIX. What if we changed the name to OpenUNIX? I think it's a wonderful name, and I think it would be great to build systems based on OpenUNIX, and even where Solaris and OpenSolaris were users of OpenUNIX in their products. I do not know if we can use it though. I talked briefly with Jeff Jackson yesterday, and he asked me to mention and/or talk to Bill Franklin, but Bill was on the phone and I missed him before I left yesterday. Jeff suggested that Bill is the person to know about the UNIX name possibly. This will not solve the issue of Sun working with the community in the way many have complained on this list, but Sun is trying to do that better, and I know from personal experience it is a tough, and complicated problem. Getting sources in a publically available SCM has taken a lot longer than anyone would like, but trust me, it is a complicated one to change the current process. Sun is not being unfaithful as the community has made them out to be, IMO, and I believe that Sun is still continuing to open all development and sources, there are just complications with legal and/or current process flow, and Solaris/OpenSolaris can't stop for that, it needs to keep moving also...there are close to 1000 engineers inside Sun, and putbacks are happening every single day. They are being approved, and going through the process as it has been known, and if it stops, there will be no improvements until the gate can open again. I only point this out because the code base depends on this process today. And yes, folks are aware that the bug system is not completely public, that it needs to go out, that some type of c-team and/or PSARC needs to be in place for the community to transition...I believe those issues are still being looked at. You will not be able to speed things up by complaining or whining about it, that will not help, IMO. Sorry for the long winded message, I know that sometimes I should just STFU and go about my own business, which I have done for the most part over the past 6 months, I don't hang out on many of these mailing lists because as it has been pointed out to me, the people that actually do write code are the winners in the end, because code talks and whining walks. Many people would do themself some good to get more familiar with Mercurial than their mail client. Learning to understand the code base will help them, rather than complaining to some mailing list. What is your or other folks' idea on using OpenUNIX as a name? -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group
