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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.
OpenSolaris has always been a lame marketing gimmick - and people with a serious interest in F/OSS don't need IBM to tell them that.
It's interesting to see IBM taking jabs at Sun, though. Perhaps those new Niagara CPUs have some PowerPC salesmen worried.
That is what you said, but this is all I hear:
"I do not have a receipt, I won it as a door prize at the Star Trek convention, although I find their choice of prize highly illogical as the average Trekker has no use for a medium-sized belt."
Let me soothe your concerns, in fact Sun without OpenSolaris dwarfs IBM in terms of OpenSource contributions
Yeah? Care to name some examples?
and it also excludes a huge amount of IP donated by Sun in the form of properly documented standards Patents and interfaces that most of the other commercial donators to OpenSource had to be dragged kicking and screaming to.
Yeah? Again, care to give some specifics? The only "IP donation" that I have seen come out of Sun is their grant of patents and IP for their "OpenSolaris" release--utterly useless to anybody but Solaris adopters. Sun hasn't even released the Java specifications as open specifications (poorly written as they are). So, where are those supposed "IP donations""?
On my Debian system, out of 1600 packages, there are exactly two pieces of software that Sun can claim some kind of credit for: Tcl (obsolete and abandoned by Sun) and OpenOffice. Where exactly are Sun's supposed open source contributions if there is almost nothing of them to be found in a complete, popular Linux distribution?
I suggest people look at your Slashdot posting history to see where you're coming from; I think it speaks for itself.
NFS was developed in 1984. Long before Linux even existed. It was engineered from the get-go to be open-standard (not necessarily open-source). [...] At the time, the _implementation_ was proprietary. Sun espoused the ideals of open standards and private implementation
Well, yes, we agree on those facts. The question is why anybody in their right mind would consider that a "contribution to open source". Open source projects implemented NFS because they had to for interoperability; as a network file system standard, there would have been much better choices. And Sun only open sourced NFS once everybody had done their own implementation anyway (a pattern they are now repeating with Java). Those aren't "contributions".
In fact, not even the design of NFS can be counted a "contribution"; NFS has poor performance, poor security, poor manageability. The value of NFS was as a prototype, to show what was possible, but it should have been replaced by something else long ago. NFS is a typical Sun effort: the occasionally good insight into the market, crappy design, and proprietary implementation.
By the way, did you know that Sun is the single largest contributor of open source to the community, surpassing even UC Berkeley?
Sun may or may not be the corporate entity that has released the largest number of LOCs under what they consider an open source license, but that doesn't make them a "contributor". A "contributor" contributes stuff that is actually useful and that supports the community. Dumping millions of lines of code that doesn't solve an important problem, or actually actively trying to compete with established open source projects for no good reason, is not a "contribution".
In fact, Sun is trying to do to the FOSS world of what they are always accusing Microsoft of trying to do to Java: Sun is trying to fragment FOSS by introducing new, incompatible standards (NFSv4, ZFS, DTrace, etc.) and new, incompatible licenses; the fact that their fragmentation attempts involve some open source licenses is not out of the goodness of their hearts, it's because that's what it takes to fragment open source.