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Sun Spokesman Says "We Screwed Up On Open Source"

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the we-know-we-know dept.

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."

12 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Never too late by thammoud · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thank you Sun for all the great products that you have open sourced. Unlike your competitors, you have outsourced your crown jewels.

    1. Re:Never too late by pegdhcp · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Probably because they are an UNIX company at the end, their track record is better than that of Novell. SUN is closer to the core of FOSS community. Also this is not the first time they admit a mistake, which takes some balls to do in IT industry. It was really appreciated (by me at least) when they switched from SunOS to Solaris and it was not just the name that was changed. I hope Novell would take the clue one day...

    2. Re:Never too late by BadOPCode · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm confused. What did Novell do? I'm not talking 8 years ago. What did they do today? Signed a sweetheart deal with Microsoft to get some inside poop on Windows tech to deliver some compatibility to Linux. Wow that is horrible. Ya they were trying to do what the EU forced Microsoft to do. Sun is rotten too... because back in 'Nam ... for christ sakes people ... get over it. These companies are delivering massive amounts of resources to the OSS community. DO NOT WHINE ABOUT IT! I understand if they do something you feel is morally and/or religiously wrong, by all means do not participate in the matter. But call me a troll but I think its ridiculous and stupid to look a gift horse in the mouth. Also note: Fanatical fanboys make no difference to the scheme of anything other than everyone's annoyance levels.

  2. GPL zfs by C_Kode · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:GPL zfs by FauxPasIII · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > GPLing ZFS would go a long way with me!

      Prepare to be surprised.

      --
      25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
    2. Re:GPL zfs by An+dochasac · · Score: 5, Informative

      I think anyone who has attempted to legally link proprietary drivers, video codecs with the Linux kernel would understand some of GPL's limitations. The fact that GPL can take from so many licenses (without necessarily exporting) doesn't automagically make it the best license.

      CDDL is based on MPL which has an explicit patent protection clause (bring a patent suit against another CDDL licensee and you lose all CDDL rights)

      The fact that (besides Java), Sun hasn't released much GPL code should not cause us to ignore significant contributions by Sun to the opensource community. According to a E.U. study on The economic impacts of free and opensource software, 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. The next highest contributor was IBM with 13% then Red Hat with 8%. The rest SuSE, Netscape, AT&T... don't even add up to Sun's contribution. And this study came out before Java was GPL'd.

    3. Re:GPL zfs by lolocaust · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What's wrong with the GPL "taking" from other licenses? If you don't want your code taken and modified without being given the changes you should pick another license that doesn't allow that (I can name one that comes to mind). I don't see anyone bitching about modified BSD code in Windows or OSX, although I'm sure some changes were given back by Apple. This isn't really directed at you as much as it is to the driver developers who got their panties in a bunch a few months ago, so please don't think I'm taking one word you wrote out of context for the purpose of this rant.

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      Why does my post history abruptly stop? I want to laugh at the stupid things I posted as a kid.
    4. Re:GPL zfs by An+dochasac · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:GPL zfs by street+struttin' · · Score: 5, Insightful

      among all the OSes out there, I think only Linux has problems, and that's a tiny fraction of the desktop OSes out there. This is quite telling. OSX hasn't had too many problems adding it, and neither has freebsd. It's the GPL that has issues, not CDDL.

      The fact that GPL needs to have everything that touches it be opened makes it very difficult to use it in proprietary environments. By using CDDL and allowing ZFS to be in freebsd, I could now use freebsd to create a proprietary network storage device using freebsd as the OS, zfs as the file system, and not have to release any source if I don't want to. That's pretty powerful.
  3. Re:still skeptical by julesh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They are coerced into behaving nicely by the huge open source community which is not that much interested in what they have to offer anymore and have a lot of influence in the market

    Not really. Java still dominates the enterprise application market (the only place it ever made any money for Sun), and its open source status is likely to have little effect on this. Even without ZFS being open-sourced, Solaris would still have a world leading file system. And I don't see where any pressure at all came from for them to open source the design of their UltraSparc T1 and T2 processors. Sun have been progressively opening more and more of their key business IP, and as far as I can see the only reason they have done so is that they really believe in the benefits of open source.

  4. Re:Sun is still screwing up, albeit not as much by pirhana · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > 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.

    This is a very important point. Regardless of any so called technical merit Solaris kernel has over Linux, its NOT going to catch up with Linux in adoption or momentum. At least not anytime in the near future. I am telling this as I have managed to get Solaris(intel version) installed on a machine after about half a dozen failed attempts. Mostly due to hardware incompatibility. The tried hardwares include even the very common ones like DL-385. Just to manage it from my laptop(Kubuntu) I installed OpenSSH on the solaris box. It took almost 30 minutes to get it installed where as in linux it would take less than 30 sec. Solaris is no where near to Linux in hardware compatibility , ease of installation, availability of applications ..... But it DOES have some cool technologies like Dtrace and ZFS. So what best SUN can do is to integrate these technologies with Linux and try to get maximum hardware sale and service contract on Linux platform. The problem with SUN has been that they are late in everything. They do things after much resistance. That is what has happened with Java and now going to happen with Solaris. I really wonder why its so hard for the SUN execs to understand such simple things.

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    http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
  5. Our Fiendish Plan by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Speaking as a Sun employee: you're welcome.

    But do remember that there's an element of self-interest in this open-sourcing strategy. It's all part of our fiendish plot to sell people hardware and services.

    Take Solaris, for example. By opening it up, we do lose the income we would have had from selling it to people. But that's been dwindling anyway, as Solaris loses ground against Linux and Windows. By opening up the OS, we make it a better product through user contributions, and encourage its spread. More Solaris users means more people who will seriously consider out products and services.

    Of course, even Linux and Windows people should be looking at us anyway, since we are now serious about products that run those OSs. (I work on documenting several of them.) But if you're already a Solaris user, then your options go beyond our x64 systems to the systems that are still the core of our business: the SPARC machines.

    There are many reasons SPARC systems have been losing ground. But a big one is that they don't run "standard" operating systems. Promoting Solaris through open-sourcing (and through other means, such as supporting it on other vendor's hardware) drastically changes that particular equation.