Notes from the Collaboration Summit

Just a note of warning based on my personal experience with Sun and interoperability ...

When AOL acquired Netscape and assigned many of its software engineers to work on iPlanet, a
joint venture between Sun and AOL, I was assigned to work on that disaster. During that time
Sun found some performance problems in one of its software server products and isolated it to
one of the components I worked on. Our tean looked into it and found that because of the way
the component had been designed in the first place, fixing it for Sun meant fixing it for all
platforms: about a dozen *nix variants including Linux and AIX as well as all flavors of
Windows (32bit). And, we did just that. Sun was pleased with the performance improvement but
had a sh?t hemorrhage when they discovered we had fixed it for every platform(!) They wanted
it fixed for Sun only. Nevermind that the component was MPL, GPL dual licensed and available
publicly for checkout via CVS.

To this day I'm very thankful for the management team at Netscape who wrestled Sun to the
ground over this and kept my team out of the politics of this. The whole ugly incident left a
very bad taste with me and forever poisoned my opinion of Sun's intentions with open-source.

The message is: Beware of Sun's stated support for open-source anything. They speak with
forked tongue.

JMHO. YMMV. IANAL. HAND. HTH.