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OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resignsOpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resignsPosted Aug 29, 2012 18:34 UTC (Wed) by landley (guest, #6789)Parent article: OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns
From http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html to this took just under 16 years. I honestly didn't think they had that long.
Remember when Sun abandoned the workstation market (thus cutting off its developer base), then killed Solaris-x86 (thus cutting off what its developer base had migrated to), then brought it back but killed it off again a few years later because they'd literally _forgotten_ the outcry the previous time? (And then gave their salesdroids a bigger comission on each Solaris X86 seat sold than the customer paid for the license?) I guess it really does take a direct meteor strike to kill off a dinosaur.
OpenSolaris was always a Sun internal political thing. The Sun Civil War a decade back was between the once-unified "Sparc/Solaris" block and the "children of Java" (which included openoffice, looking glass, Sun's windows guys... Yes Sun had a Windows faction, which arose from the "Windows JDK" folks but later included the "OpenOffice has more deployments on Windows than anywhere else" guys). Java was always bigger than Solaris, but Sparc and Solaris were where the political power was in Sun and they killed anything that was a threat to them, keeping Java on a tight leash that seriously neutered its potential. That's why Java and such weren't open sourced for so long, the Sparclaris guys squashed it (Danese Cooper's entire job at Sun, for 6 years, was fighting against this). But when Bill Joy went crazy Sun bought co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim's startup that sold Opteron servers and Andy made 'em port Solaris to the Opterion. That split the Sparclaris faction down the middle.
The real tipping point seems to have been the Windows guys getting massive payments from Microsoft (for shilling for SCO during that FUD mushroom cloud):
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2004/apr04/04-0...
Money is power in a company like that, and when the rise of Opteron left Solaris isolated they struck back by forcing Solaris open source (kicking and screaming) to politicaly neuter them (and as payback for the Solaris guys had done to Looking Glass).
If you want to get a feel for Sun internal politics and a bunch of good history, read http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/javaorigin.html
Rob
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OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns Posted Aug 30, 2012 19:21 UTC (Thu) by sumanah (guest, #59891) [Link]
Wow, thanks for those links (the Cantrill and the Naughton). The latter, especially, was a cracking read.
OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns Posted Aug 31, 2012 16:18 UTC (Fri) by mabshoff (guest, #86444) [Link]
> Wow, thanks for those links (the Cantrill and the Naughton). The latter, especially, was a cracking read.
I knew the 'have you ever kissed a girl' line, but until now was unaware that it was written by Cantrill. Ever since in his LISA 2011 talk (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc for example) he has rubbed me the wrong way mostly due to his comment on Linux filesystem developers being amateurs, i.e. the clown college remark toward the end of the talk.
Given that he was an instrumental part in porting and merging KVM into the Illumos base I have questioned his judgement since he does not see a problem in merging GPLed code into a CDDL codebase. That decision convinced me that they would have a hard time as a commercial product since the legal risk of an imho obvious GPL violation would be too large.
Cheers,
Michael
OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns Posted Aug 31, 2012 15:10 UTC (Fri) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link]
Heh, my Uncle was one of the 3 global regional sale reps for SUN for several years (asia region out of Japan at one point), and would have meetings with Scott. Around 2001 I pulled him aside at a family event and told him if SUN did not provide better support to the Sparc Linux port they would die as Linux rose to prominence in the server space. Told him we (linux / free software fans) liked the Sparc hardware, but would be forced to get off of it over time without better support from SUN. Sometimes it sucks to be right, Sparc Linux was really nice on the old Sun workstations. Oh well.
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