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Will Sun's OpenSolaris follow Iraq's lead?

  • Tom Sanders
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Sun earlier today unveiled the members for its OpenSolaris advisory board. The group of five will have to prepare the OpenSolaris community towards self-governance. The community will then have all the resources to sustain itself.

It sounds much like the story we were told before the war against Iraq – once we free the country, we will be greeted with open arms and oil will start flowing freely. And much like the propaganda before the war, OpenSolaris might turn out to be an utter failure too.

The board is made up by five members, two of which are Sun employees and two more of which are elected from the current developer community. Lastly Sun appointed Roy Felding, co-founder and member of the Apache Software Foundation.

Will the group be able to resist pressures from Sun management? Don't count on the Sun employees – no offense, but those guys need to watch their careers.

Move on to the "independent" members:
Al Hopper, engineer consultant, Logical Approach, in a conference call announcing the board said: "I've been a Sun zealot for 15 years plus."

Rich Teer, independent Solaris consultant and author of "Solaris Systems Programming at least buttered up only Solaris and not Sun in general: "I've been using Solaris for eons, it seems. This is the culmination of a Solaris evangelist's dream."

The board will needs its independence if OpenSolaris is to become a success. Sun Microsystems has succeeded in upsetting much of the open source community when it picked the CDDL as a open source license.

Although legally the CDDL is open source, many in the industry claim it violates the spirit of open source because it puts up barriers between OpenSolaris and the open source community at large.

The CDDL-decision has already caused a backlash against Solaris, keeping developers from embracing the project. All it needs is a spineless advisory board to further finish the job Sun will have created its own little Iraq wasteland.

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