James Carlson wrote:
> Shawn Walker writes:
>> If no one disputes who owns it; then why are there disputes over its use?
>
> I would have thought that this was obvious, but apparently it's not.
>
> Nobody disputes that Sun is the owner of that trademark and thus has
> the legal right to specify how it is to be used. That wasn't -- and
> still isn't -- the issue.
In the discussions I had with some people in Solaris management
yesterday on this issue (and from what I've heard, they are painfully
aware of this firestorm, all the way up the chain), I've tried to
point out that the core underlying issue is that to the community Sun
seems to be promising one thing and then doing another.
Perhaps that's due to miscommunication between different people in Sun,
or between different parts of Sun and the community. For instance,
the VP's in charge of Solaris Engineering (first Glenn Weinberg, then
Jeff Jackson) approved the OpenSolaris Charter & Constitution and
otherwise made the community feel that they had the ability to control
the important decisions about OpenSolaris, and then Ian (from Solaris
marketing) announced that Sun had decided to anoint Indiana as the
OpenSolaris distro.
We had the branding policy project started by several community
members based on discussions at the Developer Summit, and believed
that Sun had blessed that process as deciding on how a distro could be
named OpenSolaris, and then had Ian's announcement derail that by
declaring the decision made already.
In both of these aspects, we don't know if the OpenSolaris distro
branding announcement was intended to be a change to the previous
understanding with the community, or if it was different parts of Sun
not communicating, or just a belief that the naming of a reference
distro on behalf of the community was outside the scope of powers
granted to the community and not restricted by the ongoing distro
branding guidelines being developed.
If Sun management has decided it wants to move from the democratic
model of open source project to the benevolent dictator model, it
needs to come out and say so. As Shawn pointed out, other projects
have worked that way - certainly Ubuntu has managed to make it work
with the core source of funding also being the final decision maker,
but only because it was clear from day 1 that was the way things
worked in their community.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
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