Sun Spokesman Says "We Screwed Up On Open Source"

An anonymous reader sends along a video from Builder AU, in which Sun's chief open source officer Simon Phipps describes 2001-2002 as 'a period where Sun 'screwed up' in their dealings with the open source community. Phipps says that Sun is trying to remedy the situation with the open sourcing of Java, Solaris, and the rest of Sun's software."

Comments

To be fair

[Frogbert]

To be fair they wanted to open source the code in Q4 1999, however their Java ftp client just finished loading a few months ago so they couldn't upload the code until just now.

Re:GPL zfs

[IAR80]

The day they will open source ZFS will be when their next file system will be ready for sale. And from the looks of their recent performance that will be never.

Re:2001-2002?

[IAR80]

I think THEY are the problem.

Re:Never too late

[somersault]

you're saying that has a high percentage of Latter Day Saints among its employees? Or are you being ironic?

meh

[n3tcat]

So Sun decides that they can't make money by pushing the open source community around, so now they come on their knees and beg forgiveness before they have anymore problems.

Hmm...
/me wraps his arm around Sun's shoulder

It's alright man. Good to have you with us.

Re:GPL zfs

[y86]

Sun contributed 312 million Euro's worth of FOSS which amounts to over 51000 person months. This was 44% of all corporate contributions to FOSS. That's why I bought 50 shares of "JAVA". It's 10$ and it's a good company overall.

Re:Never too late

[teknopurge]

Sun is the modern-day Bell Labs.

Re:Never too late

[jdfox]

I prefer to think of it as a mnemnonic.

Re:GPL zfs

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that GPL isn't compatible with ZFS is Linus's problem. Yeah... bad, bad Linus. The only reason a Finnish CS student chose the GPL back in 1991 or so was that he knew that 15 years later, a US-American company would come up with a filesystem that they'd want to integrate into his kernel, and obviously, he could have none of that - so he chose the GPL deliberately to ensure incompatibility with ZFS's license and then proceeded to gloat and stroak his goatee for the next 15 years. And there was nothing Sun could do, since it was impossible for them to use the GPL, too - everybody knows that this can't be done.

Yes, that's how it happened - it's all Linus's fault. Sun really wanted to contribute ZFS to Linux so much, but the bad, bad Linus cunningly made it impossible for them. What a world.

Re:Never too late

[horatiocain]

I'm guessing it was the 'Google is Evil' bit.

Re:GPL zfs

[larry bagina]

"Everybody should share. That's why I won't share with you".