Sun and corporate open source [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
April 30, 2008

Over the last couple of weeks there has been an interesting set of articles posted on various weblogs on how Sun is managing its open source projects. As more companies try to get involved with free software, they may find things to learn from this discussion. So here are a few thoughts on corporate open source.

It all started with a posting by Ted Ts'o which stated:

So if you run into a Sun salescritter or a Sun CEO claiming that OpenSolaris is just like Linux, it's not. Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community. Maybe it will be someday, as some Sun executives have claimed, but it's definitely not a priority by Sun; if it was, it would have been done before now.

The posting drew responses from Dave Neary and Alvaro Lopez Ortega, among others; both the original messages and the responses to it are worth reading in their entirety. In summary, the responses say that (1) Sun really is trying to be a good open source player, and (2) Sun has done as well as could be expected, that the creation of true open source communities is hard.

The first part can only be true. Sun has been the source of a great deal of free software, including packages like OpenOffice.org which are found in almost every Linux distribution. This company has released its core operating system as open source, and it is making noises about, finally, making Java truly open at all levels. There are few companies which have contributed code at this level, and that should be recognized. Beyond any doubt, Sun is contributing to this community.

What people question, though, is Sun's interest in creating real communities around its open source projects. These projects are notoriously hard to participate in and contribute to. As Ted points out, OpenSolaris currently gets less than one patch per day from outside the company, the project's governing board is made up entirely of Sun employees, and its (non-distributed) revision control system lives inside the Sun firewall. External OpenSolaris developers have known to quit with messages like:

Sun agreed that "OpenSolaris" would be governed by the community and yet has refused, in every step along the way, to cede any real control over the software produced or the way it is produced, and continues to make private decisions every day that are later promoted as decisions for this thing we call OpenSolaris. Rather than be honest about it and restructure the community to correspond to this MySolaris style of over-the-wall development, Sun prefers to lie to the external community members while ignoring their input.

OpenOffice.org, too, remains hard to work with; thus the many discouraged comments on the ooo-build wiki from developers who want to get things done:

Many ooo-build patches are ready for up-streaming but there is no / little response from up-stream. Worse there is the perception that taking leadership and actually doing something about merging fixes would be firmly opposed. Finally - even when maintainers are active, responsive & friendly - there is no agreed mechanism for blanket approving fixes - or sub-types of trivial fixes, which thus tend to fester in IssueZilla.

The key to what is going on here can be found in many places, including in Alvaro's posting:

Besides, the OpenSolaris development model is quite different because of a number of technical reasons. IMO, the first one is something as simple as that we want to ensure its quality by following a number of processes. Another very important technical point is that we want OpenSolaris to continue being binary compatible (ABI) with the previous Solaris revisions, which is something Linux could not even dream of.

The real issue is control; Sun does not want to relinquish control over how its projects evolve. This is not a particularly uncommon situation with corporate-controlled projects; these projects will always be subject to the controlling company's agenda. Thus, no developer is likely to be successful in projects like:

Adding features to MySQL which provide the functionality which is otherwise being reserved for the "enterprise" offerings.
Adding packages to Fedora which make Red Hat's legal department nervous.
Adding features to projects owned by the Free Software Foundation which, in the FSF's opinion, are not consistent with its goals; support for loading Emacs modules from an external repository is one example.
Making any changes to Firefox which could threaten Mozilla Corporation's revenue stream from Google.

Companies which control open source projects in this way are generally acting within their rights; they may even be acting in their own best interests. The software is still open source. But the retention of this sort of control will have an effect on the community which builds around the software. In many cases, it can have the effect of preventing the creation of that community in the first place.

And that, too, may be what the company had in mind. There are a number of company-controlled open source projects which, by all appearances, are mostly for show and bragging rights. The company does not really seem to have much interest in developing a significant external community. In cases like this, if the software on offer is valuable enough, the result will often be a more community-oriented fork. Projects like ADempiere, LedgerSMB, and Cinelerra CV result from this kind of frustration.

Opinions clearly differ on whether Sun is truly uninterested in the creation of outside development communities for its projects, or whether it simply is having a hard time letting go. If the latter is the case, then Sun might be well advised to follow Dave Neary's suggestion and create a separate, non-profit foundation for the development of OpenOffice.org. Sun's apologists are right when they say that turning a large blob of proprietary code into free software is a hard thing to do. But it's harder if you don't give the community the power to help; in the case of OpenOffice.org, there would appear to be enough of an interested community to make a real go at it. This might be Sun's best chance to show that it can create real development communities around its software.

(Log in to post comments)

Roy Fielding

Posted May 1, 2008 2:36 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"Developers" aren't merely those who contribute code. Any good contributor (management,
packager, translator, artists etc) to a project can be viewed as a developer and the loss of
any of them can and in many cases does have a higher impact than a "hacker". Dismissing their
contributors doesn't do us any good.

Roy Fielding

Posted May 1, 2008 2:45 UTC (Thu) by movement (guest, #871) [Link]

Sorry, no. A software developer is someone designs, writes, or fixes software.

There are many other ways to contribute, as you point out. But Roy wasn't a developer on
OpenSolaris, and the correction I made stands.

Roy Fielding

Posted May 1, 2008 8:22 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The article refers to opensolaris developers. From a project perspective, this doesn't confine
to just software developers but everybody involved in the project. Package maintainers
wouldn't necessarily count as developers possibly by using a strict definition since their
primary task isn't designing or writing software but they are widely regarded as such and term
is used more loosely. You view point seems different.

What's holding ooo-build back?

Posted May 1, 2008 13:46 UTC (Thu) by janneke (subscriber, #15012) [Link]

Surely rancour over the need to fork belongs to the bad old days of 
centralized revision control systems.

ooo-build is already a fork with some 800 patches. The question is: should ooo-build now work hard to fork the community? There's something to say for working with SUN instead of against them.

Why doesn't ooo-build use git/hg/bzr with a branch to track the upstream 
OpenOffice CVS and go go go?

OpenOffice.org is big , even for git. Kendy has been doing some grand git testing and profiling the past year and has been submitting patches to git to up cloning performance. Then, there are discussions about what to do with the ~800 patches in ooo-build. As most of these should go "upstream" (read: to SUN), one feature a time, should we have 800 branches? And how to manage these? Scripts, new git features?

We could all be using ooo-build in a few months if it were the more 
dynamic project.

It already is the more dynamic project, esp. for developers and we already *are* all using ooo-build. Well, technically maybe not if you're still using Fedora (has its own fork, taking their own set of patches from ooo-build, hysterical raisins), but all other distros are working with Novell and ooo-build.

Ah and of course it's not "go go go", but rather GO-OO ;-)

Sun and corporate open source

Posted May 3, 2008 18:52 UTC (Sat) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]

It's hard to go by as a Mozilla insider and not comment on your point of

Making any changes to Firefox which could threaten Mozilla Corporation's revenue stream from Google.

So here it is:

The big difference here is that Sun is, of course, a company driven by making the most possible profit for its shareholders (who want to see that profit in money), so (it thinks) it needs to keep control of things to ensure this goal can still be reached (and this goal is of course not what drives an open source community).

The Mozilla Corporation on the other hand has only one shareholder, it is a 100% subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, so it needs to make the kind of profit the Foundation wants. Now that Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, mission-driven organization. It does not want the most possible money from the Corporation, it wants to see its mission succeed. That mission is the Mozilla Manifesto, which was chosen in a community process with the help of lots of "external developers", i.e. non_mozilla-employees, to extend and better describe the meaning of the early mission statement, which was to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet.

Now, if any proposal comes along that would play out the revenue stream that the Mozilla Corporation gets through e.g. Google against the Mozilla Foundation mission, i.e. the Mozilla Manifesto, you can bet that even if the first choice would be trying to fit both goals, in the end the Manifesto would win. That's why you can, if you want, delete every usage of the Google search by your Firefox installation, and the Mozilla employees even will help you as part of their job if you find there's some place where this isn't possible.

Mozilla puts the value of the mission, which is basically a better and continuously really open Internet, above the value of money. It's just a good thing that there is obviously a way to earn money by following the mission, which in turn can be used for spreading the mission even more. And this is very compatible with an open source community.