This would be a huge step for the community
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tadelste Sep 05, 2005 6:54 AM EDT |
If openoffice.org goes to a single license, then I would expect a somewhat larger community effort. It makes me wonder what's going on with Sun. Could they be stripping themselves of the overhead of projects? |
| r_a_trip Sep 05, 2005 7:11 AM EDT |
Sun is an enigmatic beast. One day they seem to be an arch-enemy of FOSS, the next day they are backing and promoting FOSS tremendously. Maybe they are a Were-member of the community. When not under the influence of the proprietary rays, they are decent community members. As soon as they are exposed to proprietary rays, they develop fangs and claws and go after anything FOSS related. Let's hope there is a "silver bullet" that can cure this schizophrenic affliction. |
| dinotrac Sep 05, 2005 10:23 AM EDT |
One needs to be careful about anthropomorphizing companies too much. In part, they reflect the people who make them up. However, they also reflect the serious legal obligations a public corporation has to its shareholders and the moral obligation it has to its employees. Sun, more than anything, wants to stay alive and to make profits. That's what a company's supposed to do. Most of their FOSS steps and mis-steps come from those desires. |
| tuxchick Sep 05, 2005 10:29 AM EDT |
"Sun, more than anything, wants to stay alive and to make profits." They're not that doing too well, are they. I wonder how McNealy and Schwartz keep their jobs, because Sun has been in a steep decline for years. So which of their obligations are they meeting? Not shareholders, nor employees, nor customers. Which leaves...what? |
| sbergman27 Sep 05, 2005 11:46 AM EDT |
Dean, I agree with your caveat as to anthropomorphizing corporations. (If only the law did not insist upon treating them as actual persons!) However, when viewed as a corporate "person", you have to admit, Sun has shone (not a typo, couldn't resist the pun) more tendencies toward multiple personality disorder than most. Perhaps Sun employees are given more of a free reign to speak publicly than employees of other corporations resulting in the perceived psychiatric schism. That would be a philosophy rather analogous to Open Source. Perhaps the "Open Source Community" living in our "Open Source fish bowl" as we do, look as disorganized to the rest of the world? Anyway, while I don't trust Sun (I'm anthropomorphizing, yes.) further than I can spit into the wind, I'll give them credit for doing things that are constructive. Open-sourcing Solaris, despite the fact that the license is not GPL compatible, is one thing. Helping to stop license proliferation is another. Hell, I'll even credit HP for chiding them into doing so. |
| tadelste Sep 05, 2005 4:51 PM EDT |
sbergman27: You have lots of reasons not to trust them. The biggest of those reasons is that they don't do what they say they're going to do very often. Further, they have lots of excuses, rationalizations, justifications and beliefs as to why they get to change their mind. |
| tuxchick Sep 05, 2005 8:59 PM EDT |
I have to disagree with the whole 'don't anthropomorphise' concept. Corporations are run by people. It's not like they are some sort of discrete non-human entity. They are people, who make choices every single day for good or ill. I don't know where the idea that a corporation's only job is to make profits to the exclusion of all else, because it's simply not true. It is certainly over-used as an excuse for poor behavior. |
| dinotrac Sep 05, 2005 9:45 PM EDT |
Sun has screwed up a lot and the people who run it (or, more accurately, the people who run it and who ran it -- a lot faces have changed) have screwed up a lot. There is no magic potion to make sure that the people who run a corporation possess the wisdom to do it well. However, in Sun's defense, FOSS has presented a serious problem to them. Their main business has been in premium hardware. That business faces extinction at the hands of increasingly capable commodity hardware running FOSS OS's . I don't know that there is a good approach for Sun's survival. |
| PaulFerris Sep 06, 2005 1:30 AM EDT |
dinotrac: They can harness a new energy source called "super-heated-scott". This new source of energy would be harnessed by building windmill farms downwards of locations McNealy uses to announce press releases. Disclaimer: when McNealy bashes Microsoft (has in the past anyway) I used to laugh a lot. Tuxchick: I don't think I've witnessed a lot of people using the anthropomorphise excuse -- is it something Microsoft does? (asking). Thinking of my experiences with HP and IBM in the past, though, what Dinotrac has to say here has some merit. I would call into HPs printer division and run into people that didn't even know the company made Unix workstations. IBM, I've had multiple experiences with multiple personality disorder from their sales and tech people -- the company is huge and when you get to a certain scale, it's a wonder anyone has any kind of grip on what the current corporate direction is. I used to respect sun a lot more when they were the renegade non-Windows supporting entity that talked a lot of open standards and so on. Then they did the java thing, but refused to GPL the core of the language. As a result, I think the effort has suffered (this is my humble opinion here). They purchased Open Office, and it looks like finally that may see the light of day as GPL'd code. The talk of license poliferation, however, is somewhat muted by the fact that Solaris has its own license. Probably, internally, the teams are managed by different people, and therefore the choice of license and so on. Who knows? |
| sbergman27 Sep 06, 2005 1:41 PM EDT |
> They purchased Open Office, and it looks like finally that may see the light of day as GPL'd code. I assume you mean LGPL code. But has it not been LGPL for a long time? They are simply dropping one license under which they release it. Granted, recent headlines have been quite misleading, though. |
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