uRandom

Sun 27th Apr 00:51 2008: Organic Open Source... Wholemeal, with Extra Wheatgerms?

Ted Ts'o has been talking about Sun and Open Source, and discussing Open Source lately; he has now revisted it.

Hopefully we can omit references to 12-year-old childish reposts to childish posts, and start looking deeper into the issues that Ted raises.

Ted started by asking "what Sun was trying to do with OpenSolaris": "It was never was [sic] Sun’s intention to try to promote a kernel engineering community", but rather that "there is significantly *more* value in having a whole undivided ecosystem based on a compatible set of distributions, where application developers, university students, custom distro builders and users are all able to take advantage of each other’s work." (John Polcher)

So far, this is a fair discussion of a few of the many merits of F/OSS software development.

Ted Ts'o then added the Organic issue - the idea that sponsored F/OSS development is somehow different from purely needs-driven (ESR's "scratch my own itch" model) development. Although Ted doesn't cite ESR directly, the "organic" concept is very reminiscent of the ESR popularisation of FSF, and the subsequent "hijacking" of FSF into "Open Source" as something close to a religion. Ted's involvment in Linux predates pretty much everyone but Linus Torvalds; Ted was one of the initial contributors to Linux, and has been dedicated ever since, so I am not going to attempt to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, nor to tell Ted the history of F/OSS or how Linux - or even Apache or other F/OSS projects came to grow so dramatically in the 1990s.

Nor am I in any technical ability able to correct Ted, given his huge contribution to GNU/Linux and the F/OSS community - so why am I bothering to write this post? How very dare I, indeed?

Ted's idea of Organic F/OSS is that which is developed purely by user demand - as Apache and Linux were developed, as prime examples. Non-Organic F/OSS, by Ted's definition, are things like OpenOffice.org, MySQL (both currently Sun-Sponsored), and presumably Firefox (still largely ex-Netscape employees?), GNOME and its offshoots (still largely Novell / Ximian / etc history for its developers?)

Does corporate sponsorship somehow tarnish a F/OSS project, Ted?

I really do appreciate the differences between the development of something like Linux, or Apache, and how things such as OpenOffice.org or OpenSolaris have ended up under the same OSI umbrella. But does it really matter?

Q1: If some crappy piece of software which you don't want to use, happens to be released under a F/OSS license, does it affect you in any way?
A1: No.

Q2: If some crappy piece of software which you are (in some way) obliged to use, is released under a closed-source license, does that affect you?
A2: Potentially, Yes. Possibly not (but don't say that to RMS!)

Q3: If some fantastic piece of software which you don't want to use, happens to be released under a F/OSS license, does it affect you?
A3: No.

Q4: If some fantastic piece of software which you are (in some way) obliged to use, happens to be released under a F/OSS license, does it affect you?
A4: No.

So what is the issue, Ted? The only way in which the F/OSS community is negatively impacted, is if we are obliged to use closed source software. Sun, whatever their motivations, are not obliging you to do that.

Sun bought StarOffice a few years ago - took it, improved it (largely in-house, but with many external contributions) and, I suspect and hope, learned a lot along the way about cooperating with the F/OSS community. I'm on OOo2.4 right now, and whilst it's not perfect, it's pretty darn good as a productivity suite - the best I have used yet (though my latest alternative comparison was the pitiful MS Office, so maybe that's an unequal test). Having one major sponsor doesn't harm the project in any important way; yes, it means that if the sponsor disppeared, or abandoned the project, that the funding would disappear, but assuming that the grass-roots desire for the product existed, then (by the ESR theory) others will appear to fund the development (and, given history - many of the same developers: See the Ximian / SuSE / Novell / migration as an example).

Ted mentions support as an issue; ESR praised it as a benefit of the Open Source licensing model itself: "Sun Salescritters who were sending around TCO analysis comparing 24×7 phone support form Red Hat with Support-by-email from Sun totally missed the point.) What’s important to commercial end users is that they be able to avoid the effects of vendor lock-in, which implies that if all of the developers are employed by one vendor, it doesn’t provide the value the end users were looking for."

If there is a team of developers whose career is based upon their expertise in Apache, MySQL, Linux, Solaris, or any other Open Source technology, then those developers are sure of their ability to work in their chosen field whilst that software is in active use.

It doesn't need to matter to them, who pays the salary, just as it doesn't matter to Linux or Apache developers. Okay, they have a loyalty to their employer, but whilst their employer values their contribution to that project, then the project will thrive.

I doubt that Ted is really calling all F/OSS project development to fall under the Debian model, with a complicated hierarchy of priests, as he ended his second post with this statement:

"So while Linux may not be completely optimized in terms of “less priests” and more inclusion, at least over 1200 developers contributed to 2.6.25 during its development cycle. Compared to that, Open Solaris is positively dominated by “high priests” and with a “you may not touch the holy-of-holies” attitude; heck, they won’t even allow you to compare them to other religions without branding you a heretic and suing you for licensing violations!"

I'm not sure quite what the point is, though. I don't have the figures to hand of how many individuals committed changes to Linux 2.6.25, or Solaris 11.whatever, or who they are employed by (and why), but Ted has provided no evidence for such strong mentions of "branding you a heretic and suing you for licensing violations!"

I strongly prefer to use Free Software. I also think that Sun create particularly good Hardware and Software. The fact that nearly all of their Software stack is now Open Source, brings me back to how proud I am that Sun employed Bill Joy to write vi (I admit - I use vim now) - if they had done nothing else, that would earn them a place in F/OSS history. That Bill was a co-founder gives Sun an even bigger place in F/OSS history.

The F/OSS community is also, largely, based around the concepts of UNIX - *BSD, Linux, UNIX... the technical foundations are all in the same places - (mainly AT&T, MIT and Berkeley, let's admit it).

The whole Organic -vs- Non-Organic issue is not an issue. I have huge respect for Ted Ts'o and his work, but Ted: we're all in same camp, fighting on the same side.

Steve

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