[As previously mentioned, I come from the Solaris side of the house, so
can't
speak for the Sun Ray/VDI org, can just provide a little insight on
what it
takes to release closed source as open source in the past from
experiences
at Sun.]
On 10/29/13 04:45 AM, Kalle Anka wrote:
1) OpenOffice was released to the open source community by Oracle
because they
did not make money from it. So, how big are the chances that Oracle
freely
release SRSS to the community? Very slim? What are your thoughts on
this?
OpenOffice was already open source, for a decade before that - Oracle
just
transferred maintainership of an already open code base to a new home, a
very
low cost operation, and one which IBM assisted with.
Open sourcing a currently closed source code base is a far more
expensive
operation as you have to trawl the source code & history to find any
parts
covered by third party licenses or NDA's (such as drivers for third
party chips
included in the hardware), excise them, and find a way for the
community to
build it without them. Corporate management also prefers you do a
scrub to
remove any comments or docs in the code that may make the company look
bad or
receive complaints from other companies - not speaking German, I
don't know
what the comments in the original StarOffice code said, but I know many
were
changed before Sun released the source as OpenOffice. In the
OpenSolaris
case, we were never able to fully open source the OS, after a decade of
trying
to clear all the legal entanglements, and there are still bits the open
source
community cannot fix bugs in, rebuild, or port to new platforms. And
when
you have required crypto keys, as Solaris & Sun Ray both did, then
you have
to figure out a strategy for them. For OpenSolaris, we assumed the
company
would still be involved and able to handle the signing for the
community -
for a Sun Ray code dump over the wall, someone would have to figure
out who
and how to transfer the keys to without jeopardizing the security of the
customers paying for support for the next four years.
For a viable open source maintainership of Sun Ray, you'd also need
Oracle to
release the specifications of the ALP protocol and any other
documentation that
is required for it - and doc writers & editors don't work for free
either, so
that's another cost.
Sun always said that it wouldn't just throw code over the wall, but
would try
to build a community - that's because the expense involved in preparing
code
to throw over the wall was too great if there was no return on
investment, and
building a community to grow the user base and possibly contribute code
back
was the result that made the investment worthwhile.
I don't know how much any of that will cost for Sun Ray or how
willing the
management over there is to do this, but don't assume this is
anything like
what happened to OpenOffice.
