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.

Comments

Welll...yes

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

IBM is wrong

[pinky0x51]

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.

Many Open Solaris options

[andrewzx1]

There are a variety of very good Open Solaris distros now:

Belenix: http://belenix.sarovar.org/belenix_download.html/

Polaris, Solaris for PowerPC: http://www.blastware.org/

Nexenta, the Solaris/Ubuntu mix: http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki/Nexenta_OS/

And of course you can go straight to the official Open Solaris Communities page here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/communities/;jsessio nid=6E46815A1C5CC33AC6470A9439DABAA6#all/

Fight IBM FUD with Open Solaris Fact.

I call BS

[mihalis]

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).

I am an outside contributor

[gdamore]

I am an outside contributor to OpenSolaris. I have several projects which are currently in the process of getting integrated into Solaris.

It is true that the development model at Sun is a bit more "Cathedral" than "Bazaar", and there are still some technical and administrative challenges to solve (for example they haven't figured out how to get folks to directly commit to OpenSolaris yet -- you have to hand off code to folks at Sun who integrate your code and walk it thru the process.)

Development of Solaris has always been a tricky thing, and historically has had huge amounts of "process" to get changes. This is because there are numerous quality safeguards, and committees that have been involved. There are famous questions that every project integrating has historically had to answer: (is it i18n safe, what interfaces does it expose? does it conform to various standards already established? is it portable to both intel and sparc? etc. etc.)

Part of the review process also has to uphold things like Sun's binary compatibility guarantee. In any respects, the _quality_ of Sun's Solaris product is much higher, I think, than what you find in say Linux, where churn is a lot higher and quality and oversight controls a bit less.

Anyway, it is possible to contribute to OpenSolaris now, though its a bit of a rough road right now. But they are making it better, and I expect it will be a lot easier in the next year or so.

Re:Hypocrites...

[lewp]

I wasn't so much saying the IBM guy is wrong, than I'm saying he's the wrong person to be pointing it out.

Between OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, and their work with GNOME, Sun has made plenty of solid contributions to OSS. Now they're supposedly opening the source for Java, which is the one thing everyone's been screaming about for the past five years and -- IMHO -- the only thing that keeps Sun relevant anymore.

I don't give a rat's ass about Sun, but they seem to be trying. Some douche from IBM doesn't need to be getting in their face because their OS code isn't open enough when IBM won't put AIX or OS/2 out there at all.

And the comment about there only being room for one open source OS is total bullshit. I hope his opinion doesn't represent the majority of IBM's staff.

FUD-tastic

[ahl_at_sun]

How this blatant FUD could be confused with actual newsworthy content is a credit to IBM. The assertions put forth in the article seem to have only a casual relationship with reality. For example:

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.

Take a look at the discussions page at OpenSolaris.org and that's exactly what you'll see. Not only are there discussion forums for established components (ZFS, DTrace, Zones, etc.), but for projects which are still in their early stages (e.g. BrandZ, Xen, clearview) that are encouraging community involvement for testing and development.

Components of OpenSolaris are also showing up in other operating systems: DTrace will be in the next release of Mac OS X and FreeBSD. Speaking personally as one of the DTrace engineers at Sun, it's been quite a pleasure working with both the Apple and FreeBSD kernel engineers -- pretty decent community for a "facade".

Not for nothing, but...

[DoofusOfDeath]

It beats the hell out of OpenAIX. On acount of being somewhat more... existant.

Re:Hypocrites...

[chabotc]

But IBM never claimed to opensource their OS's.. so i don't see what their 'offence' is, sun however does tout the 'we are all about open source' horn, but in practise is not so much

Also IBM isn't such an offender, they've contributed a lot to the kernel, apache, and many many many oss projects; Which is something i personally value a lot more then opensourcing OS/2 forinstance ;-)

Re:Hypocrites...

[debilo]

I can't imagine how many licenses, agreements, contracts, and who knows what else would prevent IBM from sharing AIX or OS/2 code.

So their own business decisions prevent them from delivering what customers and the opern source community would like to see. IBM's fault.

For the love of Pete, they have a vice president in charge of linux and open source.

That doesn't really prove their commitment to open source in general beyond their commitment to making profit. Which is not a bad thing.

More importantly, can you think of any company ANYWHERE, for-profit or not, that's done more than IBM has for open source?

Yes, quite a few. Red Hat, SuSE, Novell, and even Sun, to name just a few.

How much of the modern linux kernel was written entirely or with significant help from IBM?

How does IBM's contributing to the Linux kernel compare to Sun open sourcing an entire OS?

Re:You mean, as in, Linux?

[htd2]

Your posting gives the impression that IBM is a huge donator to OpenSource projects and Sun with the exception of OpenSolaris which you are unsure about isn't.

Let me soothe your concerns, in fact Sun without OpenSolaris dwarfs IBM in terms of OpenSource contributions, as has been pointed out on a number of occasions more code in RedHat was donated by Sun than any other commercial company IBM and RedHat included. This excludes Sun's donations such as OpenOffice 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.

Re:You mean, as in, Linux?

[gdamore]

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.

Ever hear of, oh, NFS. No? How about RPC? These Sun contributions to open source predate IBM's involvement with FOSS by a long time. Heck, they even predate the whole FOSS movement. Except for the University of California, Berkeley, I doubt any institution has ever given as much or as freely to open source as Sun has, as early as it did, or technologly that has done more to contribute to the developments that ultimately led to the Internet. And they have continued to support open source (and open standards) throughout their history.

Get your facts straight next time.

You also said:

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.

Then WTF are you doing posting here? You obviously haven't looked into it. Yes, OpenSolaris is mostly OpenSource (there are a few closed bits, but they are not necessarily critical bits anyway). And guess what? Just because Sun has control of OpenSolaris, doesn't mean you can't download the whole source tree and fork it and start your own project. (Some folks have already done this, check out the PPC port of Solaris, or the port of Debian userland to the Solaris kernel, for example.) That is what Open Source means.

Somebody mod the parent down, please!