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Open Solaris Community Advisory Board Announced

Posted by timothy on from the should-pass-a-law-or-at-least-form-a-committee dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sun have announced the OpenSolaris community advisory board, chaired by Roy Felding (co founder and director of the Apache Foundatation), two community appointed people, Rich Teer and Al Hooper (both members of the infamous gang of six that helped to get Sun to restart Solaris x86) and two sun employees - well known open source evangelist Simon Phipps and kernel engineer Casper Dik. No date for the code release as of yet, but it can't be far off now."

2 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Sigh by 4of12 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Meanwhile, like another public figure, Sun Microsystems President Jon Schwartz says:
    "Economies and nations need intellectual property (IP) to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps."
    when all evidence is that developing nations need technology, education, capital as well as respect for a functional legal system. That would include know-how that is gotten by any means, including even using industrial espionage. Consider Samuel Slater "stealing" the intellectual property of British textile manufacturers to establish factories in America - he was applauded by some American Founding Fathers.

    The progress of science has been enabled by open publication of theories and experiments. This same openness allows the best ideas to flourish and for development of technology-based industry wherever conditions permit, including lesser developed nations. The entire concept of "intellectual property" is not just a brake on the efficient operation of the free market system, but also impedes the progress of science and technology as a whole, progress which has helped improve the lives of millions.

    Some resources are of limited supply and exhaustible; ideas are not such a resource.

    --
    "Provided by the management for your protection."
  2. Re:Sun's Idea by fintanr · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Actually this isn't the intention, its not, and never has been, about trying to get Linux developers to jump ship to OpenSolaris. There is a very large Solaris community out there already - they tend to be much more active on usenet and mail lists than on webforums, so people don't seem to see notice them as much.

    Innovation in OpenSolaris will drive innovation in Linux, BSD etc, and vice versa. The all round beneficary of all of this is the consumer, be they end users at home, or large datacenters.