On Open Source vs open source
Not even that long ago I discussed Innovation in Open Source projects ..
Let me refresh your memory...
Call me oldfashioned but I still think of most of the closed source shops as 9to5 developers that write code because their boss tells them. Their boss is being instructed by clueless marketing people that promise impossible features to customers with impossible deadlines. An Open Source developer writes code because he wants to fix something , because he needs a feature , not because someone tells him to do so. To there is much more passion to be found in the heart of an open source developer than in your average closed shop developer.
Now add Michael Dolan 's comments on Open Source projects lead and managed by a sole corporate with no actual community to my notes.
Then try to understand why Sun announces this , now I wonder .. what are they going to pay people for .. features that the corporate product management wants, or features the community wants ? There is money involved .. so who will be calling the shots ?
I hope they make the right choices .. I really do !
But I'm afraid Sun still doesn't understand how to play with the opensource crowd. They try .. but run into too much walls As Michael notes , you can hardly call Open Solaris a succesfull open source project as it still doesn't have a real community. I hope one day they will realise that , drop their commercially driven doomed to fail open projects and start contributing to some projects with a real community. It took them a while to figure out the right thing to do with Java .. I`m sure they'll learn and figure out this time also :)
Sun isn't the only one not to understand how the community works.. but it's one of the most public ones that needs our help.
So what have we learned so far ..
* Open Sourcing an end of life proprietary proprietary does not work
* Managing an Open Source in oldschool inhouse proprietary style doesn't work
And lots more ...
Comments
#1 Dries : sun
Of course not every project is a great success, but imho Sun has contributed quite some important open source projects like for example openoffice and java. I don't know if they are making any money with all this work, but i think their contributions have been very important to open source.
Open Sourcing an end of life proprietary program might have some other benefits:
* this makes it easier to write convertors or plugins to handle data in the (proprietary) format of that program
* old programs which become open source might make it easier to find prior art of certain software patents
#2 Kris Buytaert : Contributing vs Being a real part of
Sun indeed did a lot of great contributions, I`ll never argue against that, However it's mostly in the way they try to open up their own projects that they need our help.
You point out some Interresting remarks about Open Sourcing EOL products ..
Sadly the fact is that anno 2007 most companies just use it as a marketing gimmick :(
or because they are forced to by angry chinese customers.
#3 TimothyP : Re:
quote:
"Call me oldfashioned but I still think of most of the closed source shops as 9to5 developers that write code because their boss tells them. Their boss is being instructed by clueless marketing people that promise impossible features to customers with impossible deadlines. An Open Source developer writes code because he wants to fix something , because he needs a feature , not because someone tells him to do so. To there is much more passion to be found in the heart of an open source developer than in your average closed shop developer."
I develop both open and closed source applications and I'm just as passionate about both open and closed source software I create. This is nothing to do with the software being open source or not, it's simply a fact that 9to5 developers don't bother about open source. Besides, open source isn't the holy grail either (certainly not the GPL),
sometimes it meets our requirements, sometimes it doesn't.