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11.19.2004
That's Spelled D-i-s-i-n-g-e-n-u-o-u-s
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and it means "pretending to be unaware or unsophisticated; faux-naif."
Today's winner of this epithet is Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, which recently announced that Solaris 10 will be open source. However, when asked what license will be used, Schwartz treated the issue as trivial: "We should know a bit more toward the end of the year," Schwartz said. "We are still debating how we're going to license it. But that's a government matter for the lawyers." (emphasis added)
As Schwartz knows perfectly well, the license is not some minor detail; it is crucial. Will Sun allow anyone who buys a copy of Solaris 10 to go into the business of selling it, in competition with Sun? Will it allow tinkering and forking? Will its license be viral, and extend to aps that interact with Solaris?
Furthermore, when Schwartz emphasizes a desire to work with "the open source community," what community is that, anyway? The New Millennium Collectivists of the Free Culture Movement or the Free Software Foundation? The sober professionals who keep the Linux kernel? Entrepreneurial developers who want to hang money-making aps on Solaris? Distributors such as Red Hat? Hard-edged IBM execs who want to turn software into a commodity so they can capture more profits for hardware and services? Equally hard corporate CIOs, who want as many choices and as much competition as possible? Third world kleptocrats who regard the whole thing as another scam? Eurocrats who want to dish Microsoft? The "community" is the bar scene in Star Wars.
Given all this fuzziness, what is Sun really trying to do? It must want to hybridize the development models, harnessing the energies of the open source approach while still making a buck for the company. But this will be not be an easy strategy to execute, especially when it is so unclear exactly which set of energies Sun has in mind.
Some clue may come from an article in yesterday's CNET News, which starts out talking about patent issues, then shifts over to the issue of community building. Sun is talking about enlisting the professionals, not the ideologues; its model is the Java Community Process, where "Google and JBoss won three-year terms on the committee governing Java for PCs and servers."
Watching these issues shake out, and watching this process as compared with Microsoft's shared source program, will be interesting. But the licensing structure is not a detail "for the lawyers."
P.S. I doubt that Schwartz is sufficiently ingenuous to think "the community" is easily satisfied, but if he is he should check out the first couple of comments in response to the Newsforge story linked above:
Personally, I think Sun has done lots to show that they can't actually be trusted. Solaris 10 isn't out yet (despite what the article suggests at one point), so I am not holding my breath here. Only once they have released Solaris 10 under an Open Source licence will we know if this is actually a Free Software licence, and if so which one. The reality of what they are doing totally depends on what licence they choose and we will only know for sure once the source code is released under their chosen licence. [sic] And:
Sun is on the Dark Side, they can't be trusted and only idiots would join that "community".
To some extent that is true of every corporate ally that exists in Free Software. IBM is our friend, not because they have some righteous goal to bring free software to the masses, but because they see its potential to open doors that would otherwise be closed to them. The same is true of Sun, though they might not see that yet.
posted by James DeLong : 11/19/2004 08:55:32 AM
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