Alan Burlison wrote:
Joerg Schilling wrote:
Well, there was a statement (from I believe it was Keith) that Sun was
going to work OSSing Teamware in 2005. I was waiting for the results
on this.
So were we all...
If you read the links I posted, you'll see that this was in fact the
case, but that it never came to fruition.
Several of us were heavily involved with pushing the internal-to-Sun effort
to get Teamware open-sourced simply because we believed that it deserved
a fair chance in the evaluation. Unfortunately, the business unit driving
the effort was not the same one as was driving the OpenSolaris work, the
people making the decisions had different priorities, etc. In the end, the
person responsible for doing the work produced a collection of source code
that was only available internally, and then the whole effort disbanded
quietly and without any internal notice.
I was not privy to the reasons and rationale behind these actions and
decisions. However, I can make some guesses: Sun was losing money, its
stock price was wallowing, and the BU in question was laying off people.
And here was a project that wasn't core (after all, Sun had already EOL'd
the Teamware product), it wasn't needed by that BU, and, looking at the
SCM requirements, was probably not even the best feature-match among the
crowd. In other words, it was a hard time and it was very likely that
even if OpenTeamware ever was born, it would not be chosen. Never mind
the fact that there was little support within that part of Sun to put
in the effort to create and sustain a new Open-Teamware Community.
Could things have been handled better? Certainly. Could there have been
better communication? Certainly. Should the people involved looked beyond
their own short term and devoted scarce resources to our community? It
would have been nice, but I wasn't the one making the decisions about what
projects to cut, what people to RIF and what projects to expand. In the
end, all /we/ can do is bemoan the lost opportunity and move on. It is easy
to play armchair quarterback after the game is over, but it still doesn't
change the outcome of the game....
-John
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