John Plocher <John.Plocher at Sun.COM> wrote:
> Sun started with Solaris, which was (ignoring its BSD roots) "completely
The roots of Sun are not BSD, although Bill Joy was envolded. The Sun 1
did use a closed source UniSoft V7 port which was a usual aproach in 1982.
Later after there was a MC6810 BSD port, Sun went to a OpenSource based
system (Sun UNIX 4.2 ....). Around 1989, Sun followes AT&Ts closed source dream.
> closed". It decided that it wanted to start the journey towards "being open",
> and launched the OpenSolaris community.
This is a missunderstanding: The Solaris cummunity did exist long before
OpenSolaris was even planned.
There was a petition for opensourcing Solaris in 1993:
http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html
There have been many other people including me who frequently asked to
opensource Solaris. For other onformation here, please search for "the secret
six":
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=the+secret+six+solaris&btnG=Suche&meta=
As you see, "The OpenSolaris cummunity" was not launched by Sun, it existed
before. Many of the problems we currently see in discussins are most likely
caused by the fact that too few people know about this. Alan DuBoff from time to
time mentiones it but people seem to forget about this fact. I believe that
most if not all problems with missunderstaning each other would disappear if
those Sun engineers who junoed on the wagon lately would be informed about
what happened before OpenSolaris was first published on June 14th 2005.
OpenSolaris would be irrelevent for the international press of there was no
OpenSolaris community. As Sun's recent success is a result of existence of the
OpenSolaris community, Sun should listen to the OpenSolaris community....
> The people involved (both within Sun and outside) had visions of what the end
> state would be, what effort it would take, as well as their own time lines and
> agendas for getting there. Some of those visions were discussed, agreements
> were forged, and everyone jumped on the wagon.
Most problems I currently see are a result of the fact that some of the
agreements seem to be unknown already and that after 3 years OpenSolaris people
would expect to see more from what has been agreed on when the OpenSolaris
project was launched.
> What nobody realized (or maybe everyone realized, but didn't communicate
> effectively) was that this transition wouldn't happen overnight, wouldn't move
> instantaneously from "closed" to "open", it would have problems along the way,
> and when it finally got there, it would have changed and evolved to the point
> where it was something new and different from all those initial expectations.
There was patience for a long time because things cannot happen overnight.
Impatience is the result that the general collaboration rules are still too far
from what people expect and too close to concepts like Mac OS X where Apple
never announced complete openness for collaboration.
If Sun learns that you cannot spend a billion to aquire MySQL and at the same
time lay off people that could help with the collaboration issues, we could be
a big step ahead.
J?rg
--
EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
