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

GPL zfs

[C_Kode]

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!

Re:GPL zfs

[An dochasac]

ZFS is already opensourced and available to all Operating systems with CDDL compatible licences. It is already available in BSD, OSX, OpenSolaris (All distributions including Nexenta,OpenSolaris2008.05,Nevada,Belenix,Schillix,Martux,Milax)

ZFS read is already in OSX 10.5 and I've installed the beta ZFS write in Mac OSX 10.5, created a pool on a USB keychain, imported that pool into OpenSolaris2008.05 (which automagically mounted it). Put stuff on it, snapshotted it, exported it and reimported it into OSX. This is the filesystem of the future. The fact that GPL isn't compatible with ZFS is Linus's problem. Good luck with that FUSE module.

2001-2002?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

How about the other years? or is 2001-2002 the period they screwed up the worst ?

Re:2001-2002?

[IAR80]

the continued exodus of top execs

This might prove to be a very good thing!

Re:2001-2002?

[raddan]

Even if Sun as a corporate entity disappears, though, I'm sure that their influence will continue to be felt. Look at Netscape. Really, they only had two significant products (which came in one package): Navigator and JavaScript. Now, Netscape is no more, but Navigator lives on as Mozilla/Gecko and JavaScript as ECMAScript, and both of those technologies have been essential to the "2.0"ing of the web.

Sun created Java, which (love it or hate it) is still being taught as part of the core curriculum in many computer science programs. And SunOS/Solaris and its many associated technologies are being integrated into many places (PAM, DTrace, ZFS, and so on). If you have experience with any of Sun's technologies, you know they're not perfect, but they're damn well thought out, and they make many parts of your daily work easier.

I hope Sun weathers these changes-- they're one example of a company that saw a coming shift in the business of selling computers and software, and instead of lobbying the government to prop up their failing business model, instead changed their business model. There's plenty left for Sun to fix in their company-- e.g., have they opened up their hardware documentation yet? (we would probably buy Sun hardware if we could run other OSes, fully-supported on it). But it would be a shame to see such an innovator go the way of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, etc, etc, etc...

Kudos to Sun

[cryptodan]

They restored some respect that they lost from me. Lets see how it goes from here.

Sun is still screwing up, albeit not as much

[speedtux]

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.

PJ calls Sun out for "abetting" SCOundrels

[Gimble]

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.

Re:Sun has a long way to go..

[JerkBoB]

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.