Anticipating the sunset [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
July 22, 2008

In his two years at the top of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz has embraced a number of ambitious changes. While one need not look too far to find complaints about how Sun works with the free software community, there can be no doubt that Mr. Schwartz has made the company far more open than it was in the past. Free software is an important part of Sun's overall strategy; this can be seen in the company's claims to have contributed more code to the community than any other source.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schwartz's time at Sun has been accompanied by a 50% decline in Sun's stock price. Whether he could possibly have done any better given the state of the company when he took over and state of the economy now is something one could debate, but we'll not do that here. More interesting, from the community's point of view, is the rumors that he could soon be looking for a new job.

It has often been said that if corporations were people, they would have the personality of a sociopathic teenager. Certainly companies can exhibit no end of the sort of moody, capricious, and even self-destructive behavior sometimes seen in adolescents - then they come back and ask for more money. An abrupt change at Sun could well bring in a CEO determined to show that his predecessor's policies were fundamentally wrong and were primarily responsible for Sun's problems. And that could bring some interesting changes.

Imagine a Sun which decided that it could no longer afford to share its Valuable Intellectual Property with the world. Perhaps Solaris, OpenOffice, Java, etc. would be relicensed under the new, Sun Proprietary Overtly Indecent License (SPOIL), with no more free releases. Hungry lawyers could start prowling for cases where Solaris code has been mixed into projects with incompatible licenses. StarOffice might go OOXML-only. MySQL could shift to a new, undocumented on-disk format with users' data subject to Sun-controlled DRM on every table. The new Java license would forbid the publication of not just benchmark results, but also of criticism of features of the language.

Clearly, some of these scenarios are rather far afield - though they are fun to make up. But, if we have learned anything from the SCO story, it must be that a company which presents itself as a solid part of the community can, in short order, turn around and go against us. Even if Sun does not degenerate to the point of starting legal attacks against free software, it could certainly put an end to the many contributions that it is making now.

Whenever one deals in company-owned free software, one should consider what happens if that company goes away. Projects with distributed copyright ownership are mostly immune to this kind of problem; there is no single company which could create huge problems for the Linux kernel by withdrawing its participation, for example. (Along these lines, it's worth noting that Evolution recently stopped requiring copyright assignments from its developers). But, in situations where a single company owns the copyrights and dominates development, a change of heart could make a real difference to downstream users. It all depends on what sort of community has developed around the code.

If future versions of Solaris were to be proprietary-only, the current releases would still be out there. But the Solaris development community outside of Sun is tiny, so chances are good that such a move would kill OpenSolaris as a free software project - to the extent that it is one now. Anybody wishing to continue to use Solaris would probably have to move to the proprietary version. OpenOffice.org would likely survive, though the external development community - never encouraged that much by Sun - would have to organize itself and, perhaps, choose a new name. Java is entirely subject to Sun's policies regarding conformance tests and such; it could easily revert to its status from a few years ago. And so on. The point is that a change of heart at Sun could easily make us appreciate the company's relatively friendly attitude now, and could create difficulties for distributors and users of Sun-sponsored projects.

There are plenty of other single-owner projects out there, of course. Many of them are entirely dependent on the continued good will (and viability) of their sponsoring companies. Others are less so. Copyrights on code released by the GNU project are generally owned by the Free Software Foundation. But, if Richard Stallman were to hit his head in an unfortunate contra dancing accident and decide that, henceforth, FSF-owned code would only be released under the binary-only GPLv4, those projects would not suffer much. Instead, the development community behind that code - strongly influenced but not controlled by the FSF - would quickly move to a new home and continue its work. For a practical example, see the creation of X.org in the wake of the relicensing of XFree86.

With any luck at all, the silly scenarios outlined above will not come to pass. But there is value in pondering how things could go. Such thought quickly leads to the conclusion that a vibrant development community is not just good because it leads to faster progress and more cool features. That community is the source for the long-term support for the code, support which is not subject to one company's quarterly results.

(Log in to post comments)

Anticipating the sunset

Posted Jul 24, 2008 2:03 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

I too am kind of down on the speculation of regime change on Sun, though I'm not sure I can
articulate why.  However, I think the point made is entirely valid.  Code availability
matters, but code community matters also.  

There are different levels of concern, of course.  For projects like Postgresql where
development began outside a commercial environment, and have continued into a variety of
sponsored environments, the lack of a large community of participation is not nearly as
important as the demonstrated ability of the project to adapt to sponsorship change.  Projects
like Solaris which have only ever lived inside the auspices of a single organization are of
more concern over view changes in the owning organization.

It's a meaningful point to consider when looking at risk-management of software use in the
open source world.

Anticipating the sunset

Posted Jul 24, 2008 6:06 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

postgresql almost died when Greatbridge went under (A .com that hired most of the developers).
the core developers point out that it's not a coincidence that they all work for different
companies now.

they are enforcing the diversification themselves where a large project (say the kernel) gains
the diversification from the sheer number of people who work on it, but even there, for many
years Linus avoided working for any of the Linux companies, specifically to avoid the
appearance that any one company would have undo influence on his work

I've seen several other projects flounder when they core developer(s) have real-life things
cause them grief. the point that we need to watch out for this sort of thing is very true.

Anticipating the sunset

Posted Jul 24, 2008 9:45 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]

> Regardless of the details of conformance tests or whatever (and the MySQL example was just
silly), the code is Free Software now, and more than anything else, the code matters.

Sure, the code is paramount, but I think the article makes a good point about the community
around the code being almost equally important. If OpenOffice is 'taken away from us', then
sure, we can continue to develop it - assuming we can find among us motivated individuals. My
concern is that it will be far easier to find people eager to start yet another office suite
rather than continue work on OO.

The FOSS community is pretty dependent upon some FOSS-but-commercially-developed projects,
like OpenOffice and Qt. It makes sense to speculate about what might happen if that
development should cease or something close to that.

That said, I do feel some unease in speculating about such things, in that it might offend the
relevant corporate entity, here, Sun. Sun deserves our thanks, not our offenses, although
still, we must be prepared for the worst.

Speculation

Posted Jul 24, 2008 13:21 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Of course the MySQL example was silly. All of the examples were silly. Deliberately so, just to avoid creating the temptation to take any of them seriously.

This may not be the best article I've ever written, but I will stand by the basic premise. There is value in looking at scenarios - especially reasonably likely scenarios - and thinking about what could happen. There is value in thinking about the robustness of our ecosystem. Forewarned is forearmed and all that.

Negative Energy

Posted Jul 24, 2008 15:14 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link]

For what it's worth, I found the article thought provoking and the examples entertaining.  I
also enjoyed reading walters' comment though: negative energy directed at an article on the
grounds that it contains too much negative energy.  Brilliant use of irony!

Speculation

Posted Jul 30, 2008 3:14 UTC (Wed) by peter_w_morreale (subscriber, #30066) [Link]

There was one scenario you failed to mention Jonathan: That a new CEO more committed to Open
Source replace Mr Schwartz.

Did someone say new CEO?

Posted Jul 30, 2008 22:02 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

True, but it looks like Darl McBride is going to be looking for a job soon too.

the historical important of Sun's open source play

Posted Jul 24, 2008 15:23 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

The Sun Microsystems experiment in open source is an historically important experiment. Your summary "the company's claims to have contributed more code to the community than any other source" doesn't do justice to it.

For starters, Sun contributed entire products to open source even when those products continued to be strategically important to it. That is in itself an unprecedented manuever on the part of a large diversified company, to my knowledge.

Then, Sun under Jonathan Swartz decided to basically do that with all of their products, including their hardware products (Ultrasparc chip design). This puts Sun squarely into being the sole occupant of a fascinating category: large (multi-billion-dollar), diversified technology companies that fully embrace open source as a strategy on all fronts.

If this strategy succeeds -- if Sun becomes a sustainably profitable giant corporation while following this strategy, then this will be an amazing development in history. If it fails -- if Sun either continues to fail badly in business and/or abandons its open source strategy (in whole or in part), then this too is historically important information.

If anyone has other examples of large companies open-sourcing products that are still important to them I would like to hear about it. I'm excluding "desperation abandonware open source" like Mozilla and Helix player, where the company open sources the product just before abandoning the product as a core part of their business. Of course, Sun's open source strategy can be seen as desperation too, but they didn't wait until their dying gasp before striking out in the open source direction -- instead they did it when they still had tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue, a myriad of products that were vastly revenue-generating, and tens of thousands of employees on staff. This makes it a qualitatively different historical event than any other that I'm aware of.

By the way, your best point in this article is that having a community is a critical part of the value of open source to its users. From my reading of Sun blogs for the past year -- e.g. Jonathan Swartz's, Jim Grisanzio's, Simon Phipps's, Bryan Cantrill's, Ted Leung's, Tim Bray's, Frank Wierzbicki, Jeff Bonwick's -- I get the impression that they are keenly aware of this and have been struggling to attract strong community involvement, and having minimal success. This, too, is one of the fascinating questions raised by this unique, large-scale experiment: is it actually the case that large companies cannot actually get their open source products integrated into the wider open source community? Maybe communities never grow around commercially important products that get open sourced.

Here's another way that this experiment might reveal new truths: what if it turns out that Sun tries to un-open-source (as suggested by Jonathan's Swartz's April 1 blog entry, which I just now realized is the precursor of this LWN article. ;-)), or that Sun abandons those products, and then those products gain community traction? Maybe the only way for companies to make their products into open source successes is to abandon them or go out of business? :-)

One more detail that is probably interesting to LWN.net readers: I've been watching Sun closely for a while now, not just reading public source like blogs but also chatting in private with Sun employees, and I guess that if they try a radical reversal of their radical open source strategy, then the business will fail even faster. This is because they have already shed almost all of their former employees who didn't "get" the open source strategy. They've undergone this vast, painful, slow, disruptive restructuring of their entire corporate culture to align everyone who is left in the company around the open source strategy. If Sun now attempts to do another such cultural shift in order to get all of the remaining, open-source-loving employees to effectively profit from reversing that strategy, then I predict that the results will be amusing/tragic. :-)

Agreed: don't hate on Sun or single-vendor FOSS in general

Posted Jul 27, 2008 6:14 UTC (Sun) by robla (subscriber, #424) [Link]

Regarding "big" companies that release products that are still important to them: I do have to put in the obligatory plug for the Second Life viewer here (since I work for Linden Lab). We released the source code for that at a time when we were darlings of the media. However, I'll grant you that we probably don't qualify as "big" (still privately held). I'll also grant you that it's vanishingly rare.

I've also been very troubled by just how much handwringing there is about whether single-vendor open source is a good thing. There is way too much well-tested, widely-deployed, general-purpose software out there that is currently proprietary. I really hope this community doesn't turn it's nose up at it in a fit of "not invented here".

I recently wrote about this general topic on Advogato in much greater depth.

With respect to Sun in particular, they've been great friends to our community (especially lately). I have to think we want more companies to do what they have done, which is at least try to make publishing open source software into a winning business proposition. If Sun fails, fewer companies will try to do what they've done. More importantly, dollars that would have been invested in open source development will probably be invested in proprietary software development (and proprietary marketing) instead.

Anticipating the sunset

Posted Jul 24, 2008 19:28 UTC (Thu) by ddaa (guest, #5338) [Link]

It would be nice if you could give some pointers (strings to search for) to interesting
comments from potential investors.

I read a few dozens comments from employees and got tired tired of it. Almost all of them are
basically just saying 1. "pony tail" (Jon Schwartz) must leave 2. the board is inept 3. the
whole management chain is rotten 4. this company is going belly up so fast it's going to get a
speeding fine.

I find it tiresome to read this much concentrated anger and bitterness.

Anticipating the sunset

Posted Jul 24, 2008 19:39 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

I saw a lot of that from employees and ex-employees, too.  Also I noticed that many of them
praised their fellow "front-line" employees (by which I take it that they mostly mean
engineers) for being good and hard-working.

Anyway, here are some search strings for comments from the business/investment crowd:


"free"

(Only a few of the comments that contain the string "free" are not about Sun's Open
Source/Free Software strategy, and only a few of the comments that are about that strategy are
not from investor types excoriating that strategy.)

"open source"

:-)

Anticipating the sunset

Posted Jul 25, 2008 9:31 UTC (Fri) by pcampe (guest, #28223) [Link]

I have read a sample of the comments on the blog, it seems to me that a small percentage
focuses on open source profitability, and 80% or more are on bad management procedures, lot of
internal bureacracy, CEO micro-managing (including 75 emails to discuss the best mug to
celebrate the MySQL deal) yes-man culture, not focusing on some technology but doing almost
anything, too many employees, and so on. 

Maybe these two different aspects are deeply connected: to be profitable with open source,
your business and development procedures must be of stellar quality (and, au contraire, to be
profitable with closed source could give you 1-2 years advantage over competitors). 

I agree with you, it will be interesting to see if they throw out the baby (open source) with
the bath water (bad management).