Anticipating the sunset

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.

> 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.