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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."
Phipps says that Sun is trying to remedy the situation with the open sourcing of Java, Solaris, and the rest of Sun's software."
GPLing ZFS would go a long way with me!
How about the other years? or is 2001-2002 the period they screwed up the worst ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They restored some respect that they lost from me. Lets see how it goes from here.
I appreciate how much effort it must have taken for Sun to move this far on open source. Nevertheless, I think Sun is still screwing up.
Solaris, for example, is being positioned as an alternative to Linux: it's "pick us or pick Linux". From an open source point of view, it would be better if Sun picked a license that allowed the best parts of Solaris and Linux to be combined, and for end users to decide what those best parts are.
For Java, Sun still has most of the control, they have torpedoed attempts to certify Apache-licensed implementations as Java compliant, and their dual licensing scheme for Sun Java means that the project just isn't run the way an open source project ought to be run.
In the short term, Sun's behavior is disruptive for open source, but sadly not in the positive newspeak sense, but in the sense of merely annoying a lot of people for no good reason.
In the long term, Sun is going to lose with Solaris and Java if they persist in their take-it-or-leave-it approach to open source. If they want the technologies to survive in some form, they need to allow a mix-and-match approach; that's what open source is really all about.
Look at this post here from Groklaw, reviewing the testimony from the SCO v Novell trial.
PJ notes that SCO enacted a license, illegally according to Novell, with Sun in 2003 that allowed Sun to open source Unix Sys V. Knowing they had that, Sun still allowed SCO to embark on their SCOSource campaign against IBM and Linux users for allegedly putting Sys V code into Linux.
I think they screwed themselves. I am happy to see they are changing their minds and hope that is not too late.
Sun OBVIOUSLY gets it which is why they are concentrating on Linux on x86 today. On the other hand, it's hard to beat Solaris on SPARC for the big tasks that need a single machine. On the gripping hand, there's only so many RDBMSes with Oracle or Java Application Servers out there (even if the numbers are considerable) and if you don't have more reasons to exist than that, you're not going to exist long.
You really have to hand it to Linus for his work and his choice of license. Today AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX are all being destroyed by Linux; The commercial x86 players (BSDi and SCO) are already done. UNIX is dead, long live Unix!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As stupid as the parent was being, this is actually kinda true. One of Novell's key locations is in Provo, Utah. Due to demographics alone, with about 61% of the population being Mormon, Novell most likely has a higher-than-average employ of Mormons. (Howard Tayler, of Schlock Mercenary fame, and a Mormon, used to work there)
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Or, less charitably, this is a company that does indeed understand what open-source is about and is manipulating the system.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple incompetence. Or ignorance, in this case.
Sun is a company comprised of over 30k employees. That's a small city's worth of people. Many of those people have been with Sun for a long time, from times before OSS really came on the scene.
People at the top may get it. People at the bottom (i.e. new, younger hires) may get it. The problem is that there are many people in-between who have been doing things the Sun way (indeed, the standard corporate way) for so long that OSS is just alien and bizarre.
There is indeed a lot of internal hostility toward Linux. A lot of it is just sour grapes, but there is also quite a bit of feeling that Solaris is the superior solution, and people are downright baffled that anyone would knowingly choose inferior technology. "If we just showed them the light, they'd use Solaris instead of that Linux crap!"
As with most huge multinationals, the company is made up of several distinct business units. Hardware, Software, Sales, Services, IT, etc. Sales people make money on software sales and support contracts. They also make money on high-margin government and finance sales. What they don't make much money on is bare hardware sales, especially if the customer wants Linux. Unfortunately, what this all means is that the people who use revenue streams to try and shape corporate focus are in a battle with the senior executives who are trying to shift the company away from relying on those high-margins-but-shrinking-buyer-pool revenue sources.
There is also the problem that for many people, a job is a job. They're not particularly interested in keeping up with things outside of their sphere of influence. Change means having to learn new things, and sadly, there is a lot of resistance to change (not just at Sun, of course!)
It will certainly be interesting to see what Sun looks like in 5-10 years, if it still exists as a distinct corporate entity.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
I give Star Division all the credit for Star Office.
Sure, Sun decided to come along after it was pretty much finished
and but it out and then give it away. However, it was the Germans
that actually built it from the ground up and gave us something
useful. They had the vision and the interest in creating the thing
in the first place. They chose to support us.
It wasn't 'ideal' in terms of free software zealotry but they were
there at the table with us at least showing us enough respect to
acknowledge us.
Giving Sun the main credit for Star Office is like saying that Gates invented the internet.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Anybody who has ever tried to do AWT, Swing, or SWXML knows the pain of just trying to lay out any form with even modest complexity. I remember VB4 back in 1994 did much better at this than even the
tools of today.
http://madbean.com/anim/totallygridbag
I write decent Visual Basic code and I am quite adept with OOP, but still find writing Java code quite hard. Is it the case for Java folks out there too?
Well I can only speak for myself, but no, I don't find Java hard. Then again I've used a variety of different languages casually, academically and professionally over the last 25 years and I've never had much trouble picking up a new one (that sounds rather grander than it really is - for much of the first 11 years of that I was only programming very occasionally indeed; my professional work began a little over 9 years ago)
Also as others have said VB is no more dying than C or C++ are; there will be plenty of work at least maintaining existing code for a good few years. You can still find COBOL jobs if you look hard enough (and Fujitsu has released COBOL.NET!)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It's not the same thing. Those are all open source products they've purchased. Novell Groupwise, Netware, Zenwork, eDirectory, etc ... all their core products, they haven't open sourced. Whereas Sun has opened every software product they've ever produced. It's great Novell is supporting the open source community, but Sun is in a completely different league.
Open that code up and consider that a significant part of a complete, sincere apology.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Have you forgotten all the cases in which Sun has kissed Microsoft's ass, taken their money and all that? Sun is Microsoft's hand puppet. Never forget that. Microsoft bought SCO to mount an assault on Linux, and bought Sun's silence around the same time. Those who forget history...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's why we have SPARC and x86.
Why we don't have both in the same box yet, I have no damned idea. Maybe it's just Sun's insistence on having their own extra special bus.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For a while, I would agree with the above, but I'm seeing a lot of signs of life out of Sun lately. They really get open source software, and are making money off of it. Simon Phipps this week at Jazoon '08 noted they're making more money off OpenSolaris these past couple years than the past 8 years combined.
It's very easy to pick at a company's decisions -- but it's really hard to turn around a huge company with an entrenched culture; other UNIX players weren't pure plays and are so diversified that it's both easy to hide their own problems (how's HP-UX doing?) or to entice hardware purchases because of broader relationships & bundling (IBM is classic at this).
Sun still has a lot of runway ahead of it. $3B in cash. $13.8b in revenues a year, which is UP $2.8b from 2005. The recent quarter problems are concerning but in context were a 0.5% drop in revenue year-over-year. Yes, it's very bad that they're not very profitable, but let's put it in context -- their big losses were 5 years ago or more. Apple was in much, much worse shape in the mid 90's. Motorola just lost $2.1 billion in revenue from their mobile phone division.
Sun is drifting slowly towards death, but, as they say, the green mile is sometimes quite long.
-Stu