Sun is working "true to the spirit"

Sun is working "true to the spirit"

I found Ron Hovsepian's comments quite different from my perception and couldn't help but comment on them.

I can't see how OpenSolaris creates any forks from any of the open source efforts and really does help many folks that do use it. Freedom is the ability to have choice, in addition to removing the restrictions of licenses. OpenSolaris accomplishes both, and works to become "true to the spirit".

Let us not forget that free software (in the unrestricted sense) goes back quite a bit farther than than GNU. I first read about Richard Stallman in a book by Steven Levy titled "The Hackers". It was this hacker ethic that Stallman based the GNU software on to some extent, which is quite dominant in open source efforts. The sources should be left in the top drawer and available for others to use, and locks should not exist, to paraphrase.

But there was lots of sources available in the public domain prior to GNU getting known (not even popular, but known). People were sharing them even before acoustic couplers were used to transfer the bits to 8" hard sectored floppies in ARC file format on heathkit computers. Folks like myself used to run BBSs on our phone lines so we could share those files. RBBS was a freely distributed set of BASIC sources. I wanted to point all of this out as both ARC and RBBS fell victim to proprietary programs (ZIP and PCBoard respectively) because they incorporated open, but inferior solutions at the time. ARC and RBBS couldn't survive as there weren't people willing to work on them to update the technology, but there are many more people with computers now and the trend has changed. This is important for all open source efforts. OpenSolaris is gathering a lot of interest these days, and people are working on it. This is a system that many folks laughed at the thought that Sun would even be able to overcome the legal obstacles to live "true to the spirit".

Even before I joined Sun, they participated in the open source efforts, and their contribution of OpenOffice was also created "true to the spirit". Sun is trying to do what they believe is the right thing, true to these roots of open source software. And while not perfect and learning to change the company with this model, is making great strides. I'm not sure how Sun has caused any fragmentation. Much of the software is the same on Solaris/OpenSolaris, Linux, BSD, OSX, etc...other than the kernel. There is more than one kernel available to use with open source software. HURD is one, and of course Linux, and Darwin. The OpenSolaris kernel is also an option today. Free choice is good for everyone.

It's worthy of nothing that there is a growing number of OpenSolaris distributions at this point, Schillix, Belenix, Nexenta (based on Debian), and more. We also have a lot of open source projects these days such as Blastwave, Gentoo, pkgsrc, and others...

Unlike some of the license loophole games that some folks play, Sun has been doing a good job at opening up the sources, issolating out the encumbered pieces, and working to get all of the sources open and free. This seems "true to the spirit".

As an example, when Red Hat released the sources to their Enterprise Server, but didn't provide any of the Makefiles or configure scripts to create them. Of course there is nothing in the GPL to keep folks from holding back the Makefiles and configure scripts to create them. That was something that was not "true to the spirit".

Or how about when Monte Vista would release the sources for the "previous" toolkit distribution while they worked to get the current sources ready in a "reasonable time". This is not very "true to the spirit".

Yet, in both of the above cases they can meet the GPL through loopholes, but the action is not very "true to the spirit".

Both DTrace and ZFS were both state of the art technologies that were released as open source. FreeBSD has a project going on to add DTrace functionality to their OS, from the OpenSolaris sources. They had the advantage of the DTrace sources, and Sun's engineers were actively helping the developers where they can. Not only are there no other comparable technologies pre-dating DTrace with the sources available, but Sun was encouraging dialog with the developers working to incorporate that technology into a competing OS. That is certainly "true to the spirit".

And the same with ZFS, a 128-bit filesystem that will take users well into the future. The current filesystem limitations will no longer have any impact on the architecture of this filesystem. There is no technology that compares in filesystems, and the sources are freely available, today!

This is done "true to the spirit", and can't fragment any other efforts, when they just do not exist. ZFS is the only 128-bit filesystem available on any system today! It seems to me that the open source world is better off with this code for others to share...

Zones technology is another effort which Sun provides with open sources, as is the Service Management Frameworks, and Security, and a lot of other tehcnology.

Mr. Hovsepian has really given no facts to back up his statements, and if he'd like to give Sun's new CEO, Jonathan Schwartz an opportunity to an open debate on this topic at a conference of his choice, I would hope that Jonathan could accomodate him. I would certainly encourage him to do so and feel not only does Mr. Schwartz represent Sun well, there is no question that he is "true to the spirit". This would make a great open debate at LinuxWorld. As I recall Novell attends those conferences, and maybe it would be convenient for Mr. Hovsepian to debate this topic with Jonathan Schwartz at that venue?