Guess what Sun is going to do

by **daniellewis** on Thu May 18, 2006 9:45 am

... Open Source Java!!

See here:
http://news.com.com/Sun+promises+to+ope ... 72760.html

Thoughts?

by **tonytiger** on Thu May 18, 2006 10:30 am

LUGRadio made it happen, of course!

I wish everyone would stop banging on about this. Believe it when it happens and when the licence has been published.

by **Lovechild** on Thu May 18, 2006 1:07 pm

Watching Sun trying to work with the community is rather like watching a trainwreck.. tragic yet fasinating.

by **silentbob** on Thu May 18, 2006 1:12 pm

Well they just passed another stop signal..

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/06/05/17/166245.shtml

by **Gomer_X** on Thu May 18, 2006 2:22 pm

tonytiger wrote:LUGRadio made it happen, of course!

I wish everyone would stop banging on about this. Believe it when it happens and when the licence has been published.

I agree that this is not news. Sun still has the same essential problem that they want complete control of Java, and don't want to trust to open source community.

The more Sun wrings its hands over giving up control, the more Mono is going to eat away at Java's market share. They need to stop making promises and just do it.

by **Mig21** on Thu May 18, 2006 6:21 pm

what annoying hype. what does it mean 'annonce that it will be open sourced eventually'? excuse me for not being impressed.

did we already have a thread about what it would be like with java open sourced?

by **ideasman42** on Fri May 19, 2006 2:09 am

I recon you guys are being too negative. they DID opensource solaris and starofice- so far they have a good track recort for opensourcing stuff.

But the bug news will be when it IS opensourced.

by **RolyMo** on Fri May 19, 2006 6:37 am

Were there possible negative learning experiences for Sun from freeing StarOffice or Solaris? eg Is the StarOffice fork to OOo a negative (from Sun's perspective)?

by **Mig21** on Fri May 19, 2006 6:58 am

eg Is the StarOffice fork to OOo a negative (from Sun's perspective)?

i seriously doubt it. there's no way they could compete with ms office on level ground, not these days. open sourcing star office was the only way to keep their star office customers and maybe even get some new ones.

as for solaris, i don't think anyone cares much. it's no better then linux so what's the point? and there's nothing amazing in there (i don't believe) so nothing for competitors to steal.

i'm still very much impressed with sun making some cpu designs freely available. not that i'm going to go make one, i just think it was very nice of them.

it's all about doing their best to survive in a market dominated by giants.

by **Nightwish** on Fri May 19, 2006 7:58 pm

nothing good to steal? apart from zones and d-trace, i hope.

by **tommy** on Fri May 19, 2006 10:54 pm

and maybe zfs. (not that linux needs another filesystem, but it does seem good enough that apple are considering it for OSX)

by **neuro** on Sat May 20, 2006 8:08 am

RolyMo wrote:Were there possible negative learning experiences for Sun from freeing StarOffice or Solaris? eg Is the StarOffice fork to OOo a negative (from Sun's perspective)?

Erm, OpenOffice is the fork, not the other way round. Sun bought it, developed it, sold it, forked it, then open sourced the fork and continued developing the original commercial trunk.

by **Mig21** on Sat May 20, 2006 8:45 am

neuro wrote:
RolyMo wrote:Were there possible negative learning experiences for Sun from freeing StarOffice or Solaris? eg Is the StarOffice fork to OOo a negative (from Sun's perspective)?

Erm, OpenOffice is the fork, not the other way round. Sun bought it, developed it, sold it, forked it, then open sourced the fork and continued developing the original commercial trunk.

i think that's what rolymo meant

by **Pad** on Tue May 23, 2006 3:28 pm

Surely all of this is no surprise to LugRadio listeners? Simon Phipps already indicated that ALL of Sun's software would be open sourced on LugRadio in Series 3 Episode 10. Jonathan Schwartz said the same at OSCON 2005. The question remains "when", which it has been for quite a while now. For me, it was no annoucement, Sun has been saying this for over a year already.

The Distro Licence for Java was surely bigger news: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=jdk_on_gnu_linux_something

As for OpenSolaris, Zones, ZFS, and DTrace are all worth a look at. BSD has "Jails" which are essentially the same as Zones (also known as Containers), except that you can now run a non-native OS in a Zone, but there is no equivalent of ZFS (128 bit file system) or DTrace (kernel level instrumentation which will be demo'd at LGL).

I don't think there have been any perceived negatives at Sun from open sourcing StarOffice or Solaris, maybe one or two lessons learned, and I don't think that Sun mistrusts the community. It may mistrust certain large software vendors who have form though.

ps. should point out that I work at Sun.
pps. LugRadio did make it happen, Jono even published the press release

by **RolyMo** on Tue May 23, 2006 7:38 pm

Mig21 wrote:
neuro wrote:
RolyMo wrote:Were there possible negative learning experiences for Sun from freeing StarOffice or Solaris? eg Is the StarOffice fork to OOo a negative (from Sun's perspective)?

Erm, OpenOffice is the fork, not the other way round. Sun bought it, developed it, sold it, forked it, then open sourced the fork and continued developing the original commercial trunk.

i think that's what rolymo meant

Yes - thanks! (Taking StarOffice and forking to OOo.)

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