When it comes down to it, nobody knows what Sun is doing with OpenSolaris. No different than any other company which must reinvent itself every five years, Sun is changing the way they do things. What’s different is that open sourcing a product creates an irreversible social event in the lifecycle of the product being released.

What’s difficult is that we’re all so used to Apache, BSD, Mozilla, and MySQL – other open source systems which have been around for more than a decade. Not only do these products have maturity in their communities but the products themselves are mature. While Sun has a mature product with OpenSolaris, the product is a newborn to open source.

Let’s also not forget that Linux is still just a kernel. OpenSolaris should be considered with regard to suse and redhat rather than Linux. And while yes, kernel development is being done with OpenSolaris, that is not relevant to the inevitable result of a community developing an Operating System and not just the kernel.

Sun is putting their OS out there and saying “hey, we’re putting our code where our mouth is, now you can too”.

If it’s anything like Mozilla, let’s not forget Firefox was a rebel project (called Phoenix); as such, I doubt we can expect anything out of OpenSolaris from Sun, the company. The best we can expect will be from a side project which Sun may or may not take under it’s wings. Neither was possible before.

Regarding TCO report and Suncritters, let’s not forget that, Sun has to make money too. The only thing RedHat has that Sun doesn’t is experience with an open source operating system. One question worth asking in that context is, what type of support did RedHat provide when it first started? The answer is free and by mailing lists; then RedHat became commercial (<1yr) and of course has 24/7 support now. OpenSolaris is a new OS for Sun, relative of course – Solaris has been around awhile, but as an OS built through-and-through by a community, it’s new. In fact, as you’ve pointed out – OpenSolaris doesn’t have a large community yet other than Sun engineers – why are your expectations so high (link)?. Moreover, TCO analysis is all crap with regard to open source and ‘end users’ typically don’t understand any better. How many folks who download open source actually modify the code? Last, the linked survey is from 2005 and not to be a chump, but, Open Source has exploded and changed dramatically since that survey. Firefox wasn’t even big yet and MySQL 5 was still beta.

Organic or not, marketing or not, community or not, OpenSolaris is still an open source Unix operating system. Open sourcing code is great, no matter how it’s done.

Let’s just call OpenSolaris “Open Source”.

OpenSolaris vs Conceived Intentions

As from /., Ted at thunk.org has compiled a rant post “essay” with regard to Sun’s OpenSolaris community.

About Ted:

I’m a systems programmer working at IBM. This allows me to get paid for what I used to do for fun, which is definitely neat hack. I’ve worked on the Linux kernel since 1991, and am probably the first Linux Kernel developer in North America. I am currently on the board of the Free Standards Group, as well as Usenix, where I organize the annual Linux Kernel Summit, which brings together the top 75 Linux Kernel Developers in the world every year. The Kernel Summit takes place in Ottawa, Canada, right before the annual Ottawa Linux Symposium.

Ted mentions Roy’s watching the ripples post, which is a great infomercial on day.com and it’s “open source” developers and their “closed source” CRM; criticizing Sun is all the rave and there are no substantial suggestions for what Sun should do with regard to Sun’s community. I won’t bother mentioning Ted is a Linux developer working for IBM and complaining about Sun. While entertaining, I would much rather see fights between the PostgreSQL and Sun’s MySQL folks just because I like to mis-pronounce PostgreSQL and MySQL is quirky.

I really don’t understand the blanket criticism. Somebody please let me know. Comments about trademarks = delete. It’s Sun’s toy, ok? If they want to share it, it’s up to them as to how and who they want to share it with. If Sun screwed you in some way, their execs are being open source media whores, or you’ve just gotten shit from Sun (and I don’t mean a 1996 newsgroup post), then please do tell your story. Complaining about Sun not liking your idea is about as entertaining as adopting a new Linux task scheduler or arguing over the transactional functionality of MySQL TRUNCATE command.

Open Source (Linux) vs. Open Source (Sun)

Let’s get back to the topic of “open source” – the synthetic kind. Since blog posts are essays now, and comments are syntactic qualifications which require research and justification, I’m going to throw a new term out there. Please use wikipedia, google, or anything else you would like to verify this newfound term, invented right here, and today – “Synthetic Open Source Community“.

Personally, I think non-organic is a little raw and vague – is it alien, poison, silicon-based? Synthetic works because while we’re not dealing with chemicals, we are dealing with “Computer Science” and we might as well qualify open source developer contributions in tandem with corporate oversight as flaming a chemical process.

So let’s not call Sun’s OpenSolaris community non-organic, we’ll call it synthetic. Right now Sun is trying to get bang for their buck and they’re going to use “open source” to do it. Linux is “open source” and OpenSolaris is “open source”; in that aspect, OpenSolaris is ‘just like’ Linux. Not really, but where do you see any Sun exec expressing and/or advertising Solaris this way anyways?

If you’ve run across some poo-poo posts on OpenSolaris, I recommend two posts (below) by Stephen at RedMonk. He concisely sums up presents both “sides” of the “just like Linux” adjunct. The other place to look are the opensolaris mailing list archives. I would recommend `-trademark -legal` when searching so you get posts about OpenSolaris and not the trademark whining.

Linux vs OpenSolaris…Again: The Q&A

An OpenSolaris by Any Other Name: The Q&A