Sun has set up a Community Advisory Board (CAB) that's supposed to - in Sun's words - "steward the evolution of the OpenSolaris community towards self-governance." Whenever Sun starts talking about stewardship, people get edgy, remembering its tight grasp on Java.
This time through, people are pretty convinced Sun "doesn't get" open source - or doesn't want to. Murmuring is heard about Sun's stated intent to cherry pick any community changes made in the name of "OpenSolaris" and put them in a Sun-blessed, Sun-tested, Sun-supported, Sun-distributed Solaris "subset."
"This is not open source," says industry analyst Amy Wohl.
Sun, which has refused to open source Java on the grounds it might fork, maintains that there will only be a single OpenSolaris source tree.
However, the "community," Sun says, can create its own Solaris distributions.
Sun is suspected of simply wanting to thin the ranks of what it says are its 1,000 Solaris developers to substitute free labor and cut its overhead.
Sun has yet to post the OpenSolaris code though it was promised weeks ago. And it's not going to be Solaris 10. It's going to be Solaris 10.1, widgetry Sun has code named Nevada. How they differ is unclear.
The stuff is now due out by the end of the quarter under Sun's new Open Source Initiative-approved royalty-free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), a variant of the Mozilla License that forbids putting Solaris code in Linux or connecting it to any GPL code to avoid having to put proprietary IP in the public domain.
Within hours of its CAB announcement, Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz, Scott McNealy's stand-in as Peck's Bad Boy, slammed the GPL as predatory economic imperialism while keynoting the Open Source Business Conference and said Sun would remain aloof from it.
Schwartz said the GPL, the touchstone of Linux and open source, "exports a form of IP colonialism to nations seeking to create their own means of production" and demand that they return their source code back to developed countries.
Anyway, to try to kick start an OpenSolaris community, Sun has recruited five people for the Community Advisory Board, whose job it is to work a governance model.
One of them at least has some prior experience. Roy Fielding, Day Software's chief scientist, was one of the co-founders and ex-chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, the highly regarded open source pioneer, where he more than brushed up against governance issues.
Sun has also recruited Al Hopper, a consultant engineer with Logical Approach, and Rich Teer, who wrote "Solaris Systems Programming."
Sun also stuck two of its own people on the CAB: chief technology evangelist Simon Phipps and senior staff engineer Casper Dik. Hmmm, Phipps.
The CAB is supposed to come up with a viable model by the end of the quarter, at least in draft. Sun said it had been piloting the community with 140 companies.
About Maureen O'Gara Maureen O'Gara is the Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.
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