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IBM Derides OpenSolaris as Not-So-Open
MaverickFire writes "OpenSolaris isn't a true open-source project, but rather a "facade," because Sun Microsystems doesn't share control of it with outsiders, executives from rival IBM say.
"Sun holds it all behind the firewall. The community sees nothing," Dan Frye, the IBM vice president who runs the company's Linux Technology Center, said. Sun could do "simple things" to build a real OpenSolaris community if it were serious about doing so, Frye said. "They would push their design discussions out into the forums, so people can see what's going on," he suggested." I talked to one of the OpenSolaris developers at the project's LWCE booth in the "dot-org ghetto," and though it wasn't in response to this article, he pointed out that OpenSolaris takes contributions from all comers, has active public mailing lists, open IRC channels, and several online communities, so Frye's description seems at least overblown.
It's more open than AIX, that's for sure.
Game... blouses.
I think this has more to do with IBM feeling the heat over not doing *anything* to open-source AIX. Sure OpenSolaris isn't quite as open as some would like, but it's more than what IBM has done with AIX. C'mon IBM, open up AIX!
This is true. It is more open the AIX. IBM does not, however, claim that AIX is open. OpenSolaris is also more open than Windows, whatever software the NSA uses to crack codes, and a closed door, but of these things, only OpenSolaris claims to be open, and it is these claims Mr. Frye is addressing.
Whether IBM is right or not that OpenSolaris has a development community, OpenSolaris is true Free Software.
Free Software is not about a development method but about a way of licensing software. Free Software can build in a community process and in a in-house process as proprietary software can be developed in a community or in-house. It's not the development method which makes something Free Software it's the license.
Sad to see that even such a big company with such a big "linux-centre" like IBM doesn't really understand Free Software.
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I can't imagine how many licenses, agreements, contracts, and who knows what else would prevent IBM from sharing AIX or OS/2 code. Besides, what does "if IBM really cared about openness" mean? Of course IBM cares about open source. For the love of Pete, they have a vice president in charge of linux and open source. More importantly, can you think of any company ANYWHERE, for-profit or not, that's done more than IBM has for open source? How much of the modern linux kernel was written entirely or with significant help from IBM?
If IBM really cared about openness, they should open source AIX or OS/2 and shut up about Solaris.
IBMs donated some AIX features to linux and MS has some say in what happens to OS/2.
While I warmly thank Sun for their massive donations to free software, I wish they'd just STFU until they actually Open Source something. Most of the criticism they get is for flip-flopping on open source.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
IBM is just full of it. If OpenSolaris were not for real do you think they would have gone to the trouble of changing their source code control system from the in-house Teamware stuff to Mercurial (see this ).
No, that is the kind of wrenching and disruptive change that you do if you're really serious about pulling in developers outside the corporate WAN. If it were a facade they could have built a more impressive facade much more quickly.
Progress is slow on OpenSolaris because unlike Linux in 1991, Solaris is already a mission-critical operating system in many enterprises, and because they are trying to pull in non-employee contributions whilst maintaining quality. This is actually difficult.
Disclaimer: I was on the invite-only OpenSolaris pilot program and got some free t-shirts (none of which fit).
That doesn't really prove their commitment to open source in general beyond their commitment to making profit. Which is not a bad thing.
Yes, quite a few. Red Hat, SuSE, Novell, and even Sun, to name just a few.
How does IBM's contributing to the Linux kernel compare to Sun open sourcing an entire OS?
The poster claims
.Net is certainly open source. But it's not. I congratulate Sun on what they're doing, but that's still not true open source. Making the definition of open source muddy is really not a good idea.
"...he pointed out that OpenSolaris takes contributions from all comers, has active public mailing lists, open IRC channels, and several online communities, so Frye's description seems at least overblown."
With my apologies, if these things make something open source,
OS/2 will never be open sourced. AFAIK, Microsoft holds copyrights to some of that code.
But, maybe not in the way you mean.
Sun's own tools have driven more people to install GNU software on a Solaris machine than any other thing has caused people to migrate to Open Source.
Back in the day, a Sun which didn't have GNU tools was not very useful.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So bugger off *BSD. Very open-minded of him
Most likely, AIX may also have some code in it that prevents them from open-sourcing it due to licensing.
Keep in mind they're already in enough legal battles over intellectual property licensing. While SCO's claims regarding IBM and Linux may be trollish, the impression I get is that SCO WOULD actually have significant legitimate claims against an "open source" AIX.
The end result is that rather than opensourcing AIX (which would be a rather pointless endeavor as the impression I get is that IBM is "sunsetting" it in favor of Linux), IBM is simply taking all of the Good Parts from AIX which they can and merging them into Linux.
Remember, open-sourcing a product isn't always a simple matter of taking a snapshot of your source tree, making it public, and adding a new license. Frequently, a company may not own all the code in a program and can't open source it without ripping out some of their code and either spending time replacing/rewriting it or releasing what is essentially open-source crippleware. In a situation where there is no even remotely competitive open-source alternative (see Quake and Mozilla), it makes sense to release crippleware and let the community fill in the holes over time, as even if it takes the community years (Mozilla/Firefox) to fix the holes, it still puts them way ahead. In the case of AIX, there would be utterly no point whatsoever in releasing it if IBM were required by licensing agreements to remove critical parts. Unlike Mozilla, with AIX there's a healthy and robust open-source competitor which would be dominant in developer and user mindshare even if it were open-sourced in complete form.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I don't see openAIX floating around.
;)
Sure they've ported some of the technologies and added the opensource toolbox to AIX (imagine an RPM that can be installed on AIX and interfaces with the existing AIX package system).
Why is there no JFS2 for Linux? Why can't I mount a JFS2 filesystem on the SAN on my Linux machine? Why has the AIX lvm not been ported to Linux or why has IBM not contributed to the Linux LVM2 the ability to import AIX volume groups along with the requiste filesystem support on Linux? Why the hell don't I have lsdev, lscfg, lsattr for Linux? That alone would save me alot of effort.
Look the ODM is not the greatest thing since sliced bread but AIX has other good ideas that IBM should contribute instead of bitching about OpenSolaris. Shit they just want to sell more pSeries boxes anyway
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I suggest looking through the Linux kernel change histories sometime. There are a _lot_ of IBM email addresses in there.
And not just there. Have a look at most Apache projects too, for that matter.
There's a reason why SCO went after IBM. Well, ok, a second reason, beside the obvious "because SCO is on a pump and dump scheme." Like most lies, SCO's "IBM took our IP they had used in AIX and put it into making Linux enterprise-ready" is based on a small grain of truth, although in this case one irrelevant to the lawsuit. The truth is that IBM did donate that much code to Linux, and some which, indeed, is a part of why Linux is enterprise-ready OS instead of an academic toy. At any rate, a lot of that is either AIX code or it uses techniques developped for AIX.
If you read the RTFA, even there they spell it out repeatedly: "It prefers Linux and its own proprietary version of Unix, called AIX." ("It" being IBM.) Or even better: "IBM helped put Linux on the map, funding programmers to improve the operating system and offering early pledges of support that indicated it was safe for customers to use. The company has more than 600 programmers at its Linux Technology Center, but it's actively involved in many open-source projects besides Linux."
So basically IBM _does_ put a lot of money and work into a F/OSS OS. It's not AIX, but in hindsight, a lot of us actually prefer it that way. The great Unix fragmentation happened precisely because everyone wanted to make their own flavour deliberately incompatible to everyone else's, trying to lock their customers in. And that's how Unix lost back then, and why nowadays we have Windows instead on most computers. Does anyone (other than MS) want _that_ to repeat verbatim again? Not me, anyway. So thank goodness that IBM contributes to Linux this time, instead of trying to divide-and-conquer the F/OSS OS market with an OpenAIX.
I don't know exactly how "open" OpenSolaris is. Maybe it's really open, maybe it's one of Sun's usual smoke screens. No idea. I couldn't be bothered to care about it at that point.
But even OpenSolaris is a very new development. What I'm getting at is: IBM was putting its money where its mouth was, _long_ before Sun.
So excuse me if I find it outright funny to see someone claim that IBM isn't doing anything there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...I like some of the things IBM is doing now, but never forget they are a very, very big company whose agenda always directed at making money for their shareholders. They have a business motive behind everything they do.
IBM is a big champion of Linux now, but it wasn't all that long ago that they were issuing stern warnings to those who foresake the safety of proprietary software about the dangers of getting "locked into open source."
IBM would probably happily lock people into Linux... whatever, exactly, that would mean... if they can figure out how to do it and can see an advantage to IBM in doing it.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You do realise that IBM are in court right now, for the heinous crime of taking large gobs of its own AIX code and putting it in Linux, aren't you?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
So this rant of one IBM executive is completely baseless and probably intended to promote IBM at Sun's expense.
Agreed - and of course it's intended to promote IBM at Sun's expense.
Isn't it crazy that IBM, who's contributions to F/OSS (whilst large & also warmly thanked for) are dwarfed by Sun's contributions are able to get away with this?
The reason I suspect is Sun's flip-floppiness & skittishness when it comes to F/OSS - they contribute much, but also help spread a litlle anti-F/OSS FUD, etc. IBM's stance hasn't changed for what? eight years now.
CDDL is part of that problem I think - as the article notes, linus had 10 times as many people contributing to linux in his first year than Sun - with all their resources - had contributing to opensolaris in its first year.... A pity.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I, along with others, complained about the "Joint Contributor's License" required to merge code into the primary OpenOffice.org tree. While other projects requires every copyright contributor to agree to a license change in the future, such as making the product close-source for future releases, the contributor's license already gives Sun the right to change the license at any time. In response to these complaints, Sun Microsystems claimed that there would be a non-profit formed and copyright controlled handed over to it. Unlike Sun that must answer it's board and investors to turn a profit which can sometimes run counter to being dedicated to keeping a project Open Source, the non-profit's purpose would be to ensure that OpenOffice will always be Open. It is now several years later and I'm still waiting for Sun to create the non-profit organization that will be handling the contributions.
Bottom line: Sun will claim anything to head off complaints but has no follow through. Only trust the Sun if you want to get burned.