The sooner the better the OS is commodotised and made as unimportant to a user as a chipset, the sooner we can move on and have the available talent pool produce actual stuff of value. Jeez, OS wars are so 1980’s.

You don’t get it the Linux Kernel is not the community. The majority of people that use open source software probably couldn’t even accurately tell you what a kernel does or could care less. It could be Mach, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. It just hast to work, and except for Mach they all work. They don’t care how the kernel handles memory, they want to know if they can run Apache, Tomcat, or whatever software they need.

People like open source OS’s because they’re similar and they offer choices. If *BSD is the best choice for them they can choose that, if RHel, or SuSE or Debian is they can go with that. If OpenSolaris is then they have that option. Solaris and AIX are also still options if those suit them better though not open. While there are differences there are more similarities from a user’s perspective.

You’re giving a very narrow definition of what the community is and ignoring all the other contributions Sun has made trying to paint them as someone that doesn’t participate. Like I said, which you ignored, look at their contributions that are in Debian. Ubuntu and other popular distros are based on Debian.

You can’t claim you’re not aware of Sun’s contributions as they touch on some of your projects. The GNOME accessibility enhancements being one. Sun didn’t make those just for JDS or Solaris.

“I might also note that Novell might have taken the same approach as Sun, by trying to open source Netware under a Linux-incompatible license and tried to build its own community.”

Or you could have open sourced Novell under a GPL compatible license. But nobody is screaming “set NetWare free”. It doesn’t have the same demand/market that Solaris still has. GPL isn’t the only game in town and it has it’s problems. Maybe GPLv3 will fix them but it doesn’t seem likely that Linux wants to or even feasibly can switch to it.

When possible, we are trying to work with the Fedora community on tools that can be shared between distros — and the work we do on the Linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, and everything else benefits or has the potential to benefit Fedora as well.

Sun is saying, “hey ISVs – build something that runs only on our platform, hey community, work on OUR kernel, and trust us to dictate the direction of the OS.”

I might also note that Novell might have taken the same approach as Sun, by trying to open source Netware under a Linux-incompatible license and tried to build its own community. It didn’t – Novell chose to participate in a larger community, and it has shown enormous benefit for Novell, and a benefit for the larger community as well. So the argument that Sun couldn’t possibly give up control over its OS holds little sympathy for me.

I don’t think that’s true — we just have a different take.

“While Windows continues to grow in the server space at the expense of Unix, Linux seems to be aimed at making a dent in the Unix market.”

I’d disagree that Linux is “aimed” at making a dent in the Unix market — though it is a natural replacement for proprietary Unix. I’d like to see Windows displaced — or at least blocked from new deployments — in the server room as much as possible.

” It’s the communities that are important and it’s important that they work together rather than fight each other for the scraps MS leaves behind.”

I agree – which is why I see little room for Sun to build a parallel community using OpenSolaris (i.e., fighting with Linux over MS’s “scraps”).

I wouldn’t like to *make* Sun participate, but I do think they should. And yes, it’d be a good thing for them to liberate the Solaris kernel, IMHO.

On the other hand, I’m wondering what problems you can solve with openSuse that you can’t solve by participating in the Fedora community? At least Sun has a totally different kernel. What is so different in openSuse which is not in Fedora (except layout and appearance of the desktop)? If appearance is the difference you want, Sun has differentiated there too with its Nimbus theme.

On the other hand, I’m wondering what problems you can solve with openSuse that you can’t solve by participating in the Fedora community?

At least Sun has a totally different kernel. What is so different in openSuse which is not in Fedora (except layout and appearance of the desktop)? If appearance is the difference you want, Sun has differentiated there too with its Nimbus theme.

First let me state that I do not work for Sun or on the OpenSolaris project or any corporate sponsored/affiliated open source project. I have used a number of different Unix OS’s as well as Linux in the forms of Debian, RHEL, CentOS, Ubunto and DSL for that POS laptop I still keep around.

You say “On the other hand, I’m wondering what problems Sun can solve with OpenSolaris that it can’t solve by participating in the Linux community?”

Linux is a small part of GNU/Linux. It’s just a kernel. When most people talk about Linux, they mean the whole OS, contrary to what RMS would like. Not just the Kernel but the userland tools, windowing systems and other applications that make “Linux” usable. Most of us users of Open Source software and those of us that distribute our own, do so at a level far removed from the Kernel. We may not right the next new filesystem but we may build a tool that makes it easier for someone to build their web application as an example.

The Linux Kernel community is small in comparison to the open source communities that are built on top of it. Your post seems to try and blur the line. Which is the opposite of what Sun’s intentions of the CommunityOne conference were. That’s what Ian Murdoch seamed to be saying clearly anyway.

Sun contributes a lot to the “Linux Community”. In the 2006 “Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU” When comparing contributions to Debian, Sun was by far the greatest corporate contributor of source code with 51,372 person months with an equivalent cost of 312Mil Euros. Number two was IBM with 14,865. Three was RedHat with 9,748. Novell was not in the top 10 though Ximian was at 8 with 4,985. Sun’s contribution doesn’t seem to include OpenOffice.org which is estimated at 79,237 at a cost of 482Mil Euro. Other Open Source projects like Netbeans, OpenJDK, OpenSolaris, GlassFish, etc that Sun has started and the large number that they participate in, donate to or fund development of is very large as well.

It’s not uncommon to see email sun.com email addresses on the LKML. As an example, in 2004 Mike Waychison of Sun posts a very detailed specification of the Solaris automountfs system so that Linux’s autofs better. http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/1/6/167 Was this because Sun wants to sell it’s expensive and lucrative autofs products!?!?!?!

You seem to have missed the whole point of CommunityOne at least my take on it. The Open Source Community is supposed to be the tide the elevates all of it’s individual members whether their boats be big or small. While Windows continues to grow in the server space at the expense of Unix, Linux seems to be aimed at making a dent in the Unix market. Let’s say Linux completely takes over the Unix space. What then? Microsoft already ate most of it away. Is that going to stop?

Linux is not important, OpenSolaris is not important OpenSuSE, RHEL, the BSD’s etc are not important. It’s the communities that are important and it’s important that they work together rather than fight each other for the scraps MS leaves behind.

A colleague runs OpenBSD on his laptop. He’s got KDE, OpenOffice, etc running there. Would you now say that the BSD folks are now trying to become another Linux ?

Note: I am myself a long time Linux user, and I help maintain Linux servers at work. My family uses Ubuntu at home.

The OpenSolaris.com distro is aimed at giving Gnome users an environment they are used to – the GNU userland, Gnome, etc, while at the same time maintaining a the regular Solaris userland, the Solaris kernel, and the Solaris technologies that differentiate it form Linux and other Un*x OS.

The Belenix development team certainly thinks that giving a familiar desktop environment is a great way to get software developers to start to use OpenSolaris’ features. We like KDE and offer users a KDE desktop. Our desktop provides links to documentation on DTrace for starters. We’re going to work with the documentation community to help improve documentation as needed, and will also figure out what other documentation we can include on Belenix to get users started with OpenSolaris.

We also believe that though Indiana may not be as “community developed” as we’d all have liked it to be, it’s good that Sun is retaining control over what they’re going to provide paid commercial support for. (None of these beliefs have been stated explicitly, though I’m increasingly convinced that we may have to state these beliefs explicitly somewhere.)

I personally believe that there are enough advantages in the Solaris kernel + technologies that Sun need not abandon Solaris altogether and invest time in the Linux userland (and to the extent that they would be allowed to change things – the Linux kernel).