LWN: Comments on "Sun and corporate open source"

Apple seems to be doing a very nice job

kov — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:00:02 +0000

This really is something I would not expect saying anytime soon, but Apple does seem to be
doing a very nice job with WebKit at this time. It seems like they have had a hard time with
KHTML developers a while ago, but it is impressive to see that they have an open Trac, SVN,
wiki, and that the collaboration model does seem to be very open, with people from the outside
having commit rights and being able to design their own APIs.

Sun and corporate open source

KaiRo — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:52:29 +0000

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.

Sun and corporate open source

Jaffa — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:05:10 +0000

This is very similar to the situation with Nokia's Maemo-based Internet Tablets (e.g. the 770,
N800, N810 and N810W). It's an open source base but with very little community involvement,
exactly because Nokia want too much control.

I wrote something about this, including what I've termed the "open source triangle": Community
involvement, Openness and Control are all pulling in different directions:

http://www.maemopeople.org/index.php/jaffa/2008/04/20/mae...

Of course, OpenSolaris and OO.o are much bigger projects - and more important to Sun - than
Maemo is to Nokia, but it's interesting to see both these big companies have very similar
problems.

I Call Shennanigans

smoogen — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:14:19 +0000

Actually it should mean any patch has to run through a large test suite to make sure it does
not break ABI, API, or other tests.

I Call Shennanigans

vmole — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:14:14 +0000

Another very important technical point is that we want OpenSolaris to continue being binary compatible (ABI) with the previous Solaris revisions...

What has that got to do with whether or not you support and encourage outside developers? That's just a limit on what a patch can do, just like Linus won't accept patches that break the system call interface.

Sun and corporate open source

roblatham — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:02:33 +0000

You can add the distributed file system Lustre to the list of sun-sponsored
source-available projects.  

In addition to issues of control, it's a tough balance to strike when your
revenue model is to give away the software and sell support. A lot of
responses on the lustre mailing list are along the lines of "we'd be happy to
fix that. Please contact us about a support contract".

You can give away source code (and Lustre is under the GPL), but open
development is an important component of successful open source projects.

What's holding ooo-build back?

janneke — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:46:40 +0000

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

movement — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:58:29 +0000

The Solaris kernel + stuff gate is still Teamware, with a real-time Mercurial read-only bridge
(which is publicly available to all). To make changes, you have to use Teamware. This is why
the request-sponsor process exists.

OpenOffice.org foundation

man_ls — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:30:16 +0000

If Sun creates a foundation for OpenOffice.org development external people might contribute, not only with patches but financially as well. IBM has largely done this with the Eclipse foundation and by now it has built a huge momentum. Compare with Sun's NetBeans which is apparently better software, but is not so popular by far within the Java ecosystem.

Roy Fielding

rahulsundaram — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:22:20 +0000

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.

Sun and corporate open source

jschrod — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:02:01 +0000

Huh? The Sun folks that I know and work with tell me that Solaris VCS has moved largely to
Mercury by now. I dunno about Java, don't know any of these folks.

What's holding ooo-build back?

edschofield — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:53:32 +0000

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

Why doesn't ooo-build use git/hg/bzr with a branch to track the upstream OpenOffice CVS and go
go go? We could all be using ooo-build in a few months if it were the more dynamic project.

Sun and corporate open source

botsie — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:32:49 +0000

> 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.

Minor quibble: Sun's internal VCS is Teamware, which is an early distributed version control
system designed by Larry McVoy before he wrote BitKeeper.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeamWare for details.

Roy Fielding

movement — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:45:59 +0000

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

rahulsundaram — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:36:24 +0000

"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

movement — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:05:21 +0000

Roy Fielding was not an OpenSolaris developer: he never contributed any
code to the project (or tried to).

(He was involved, yes, but it's not like the project lost a hacker.)