Adventures in home working

Everyone knows that Linux is flavour of the decade, so I found this blog post very interesting as it explained why its not easy to replace Solaris with Linux or to merge Solaris capabililities into some future version of Linux.  It also illustrates one of the challenges faced by theOpen Source community in general, how to you coordinate major changes that affect hundreds of files, distributed architecture and design seems more difficult than distributed development.  The main guts of the post follows:

The main reason we can’t just jump into Linux is because Linux doesn’t align with our engineering principles, and no amount of patches will ever change that. In the Solaris kernel group, we have strong beliefs in reliability, observability, serviceability, resource management, and binary compatibility. Linus has shown time and time again that these just aren’t part of his core principles, and in the end he is in sole control of Linux’s future. Projects such as crash dumps, kernel debuggers, and tracing frameworks have been repeatedly rejected by Linus, often because they are perceived as vendor added features. Not to mention the complete lack of commitment to binary compatibility (outside of the system call interface). Kernel developers make it nearly impossible to maintain a driver outside the Linux source tree (nVidia being the rare exception), whereas the same apps (and drivers) that you wrote for Solaris 2.5.1 will continue to run on Solaris 10. Large projects like Zones, DTrace, and Predictive Self Healing could never be integrated into Linux simply because they are too large and touch too many parts of the code. Kernel maintainers have rejected patches simply because of the amount of change (SMF, for example, modified over 1,000 files). That’s not to say that Linux doesn’t have many commendable principles, not the least of which is their commitment to open source. But there’s just no way that we can shoehorn Solaris principles into the Linux kernel.

Of course, as Eric Raymond says, we could create a fork of the Linux kernel. But this idea lies somewhere between idealistic and completely ludicrous. First of all, there’s the sheer engineering effort. Even after porting all the huge Solaris 10 (and 9, and 8 …) features to a branch of the Linux kernel, we would enter into a perpetual game of “catchup” with the main branch. We’d be spending all of our time merging patches and testing rather than innovating. With features such as guaranteed binary compatibility, it may not even be possible. Forget the fact that such a fork would probably never be accepted by the Linux community at large. The real problem with creating a fork of the Linux kernel is simply that the GPL doesn’t align with our corporate principles. We want to have ISVs embedding Solaris in their set-top box without worrying about how to dance around the GPL while keeping their IP private. Even if you can tiptoe around the issue now by putting your code in a self-contained module, the Linux kernel developers could actively work against you in the future. Of course, we could still choose a GPL compatible license for OpenSolaris, at which point I’ll end up eating my words.

In the end, dumping Solaris into Linux makes no sense, either technically or philosophically. I have yet to hear a convincing argument of why ditching Solaris would be a good thing for Sun. And I can’t begin to imagine justification for forking the Linux kernel. To be clear, we’re not out to rule OpenSolaris with an iron fist. Because we own our intellectual property, we can make a licensing decision that reflects our corporate goals. And because we’ve put all the engineering effort behind that IP, we can instill similar beliefs into the community that we spawn. These beliefs may change over time: we would love to see a OpenSolaris community where we are merely a participant in a much larger game. But we’ll be able to build a foundation with ideas that are important to us, and fundamentally different from those of the Linux community.

I am an enterprise architect, and it’s sometimes a challenge to balance making the right technical choice with the right choice.  David Chappell talks about this in the context of Open Source J2EE.

I’ve gotten some interesting comments from readers of my latest column in Application Development Trends. The major complaint is that I didn’t give enough weight to the role that open source J2EE technologies like Tomcat and JBoss play in this market, describing it instead as controlled by IBM and BEA

He puts this down to the fact that:

My perspective is very focused on enterprises, the people who control the large majority of IT spending. In this world, there’s some use of open source J2EE technologies, but it’s a definite minority. There are vastly more applications running on WebSphere and WebLogic, and so viewing this market as dominated by these two is accurate

Of most interest though is how he characterises the Open Source community:

In most of my interactions with open source advocates, including this one, the arguments I hear tend to be rooted in a purely technical view of the world. This probably reflects the strong technical orientation (they’re developers) and relative lack of experience (they’re young) of the traditional open source fan. It’s not surprising that they don’t understand how enterprise IT decisions are made, since they’ve not usually been involved in making them. From a purely technical perspective, open source J2EE looks pretty good. To a typical enterprise decision maker, however, WebSphere and WebLogic are still better options.

By far it’s the best study in open source I have read. Starting from social, political, and economical views, he provides real and detailed insight into how Open Source works.  Unlike The Cathedral and the Bazaar which relies more on experience, this book relies on detailed analysis, and relates Open Source to well established political science thoery. He goes well beyond describing the origins and organization of the movement but also describing business models and roles that companies have been adopting to support and work with open source software. It’s a long book, and starts to falter towards the end but its well worth the effort if a thorough understanding is important to you. “The Success of Open Source” is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand what is open source and its relevance for today’s society.

In this post I pointed to a remarkably frank interview where Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer, and Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive explained their strategy to ZDNet UK.  Prior to this interview Jonathan had gone a bit over the top in one of his blogs articles where he said:

Please do not listen to the bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists. They were lunatics then, they are lunatics now, they will always be lunatics. We love the open source community, we spawned from it. We’ll protect that community, that innovation, and our place in it, with all our heart and energy.

Not suprisingly if you read the post and the ZDNet article Red Hat must be feeling a bit miffed with Jonathan right now, but Michael Tiemann in his responce goes equally over the top on his blog where he says:

The open source community doesn’t do what you ask them to do unless either (a) they trust you, or (b) what you ask them to do fits into some larger goal they’ve already signed onto. Merely being pathetic doesn’t score a whole lotta points, even if you are an executive of a once-great company

There are some interesting comments to Michael Tiemanns’ article. The first comments that Red Hat executives should not speak for the open Source community:

You sure use the word us and we a lot for being a profit driven corporation. You are a representative of Redhat not that of all of Open Source. The us and we bit is pretty silly. Stop trying to turn issues into a us versus them argument. For many people, linux is about unification and standards, not the same old Unix wars of the 90s. Sun makes strong contributions to the open source world as does Redhat. The open source issue is not as clear cut as you try to present it.

The other comments asks both executives to get things in perspective and stop bickering:

I hate it when executives argue and bicker over the internet. it really does make you look immature. Sun has their views and you have yours. Personally i disagree with you both.

” We are not bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists. We are realists, living in a world of reality. Come join us. Calling us lunatics and making other claims that don’t stand up is not the Open Source way. “

Actually you guys are numbskulls and you don’t live in a world of reality, you live in a world of idealogy. Realists would have the insight to see that Open Source software development will never kill Proprietary software development and realists would not spread FUD over Poprietary software development, instead realists would work on interoperability issues. Realists would not have the “Windows must die for Linux to live” mentality. Personally I dont want Linux to become the dominant OS on computers. I like having Windows, Solaris, Mac and linux. Believe it or not I use Windows, Solaris and Linux. They all serve a purpose and they all perform their jobs well. This is software people not the second coming.

I have read this book of essays a couple of times, the last time as a refresher for a project I am currently working on.  I like the book, its approachable and well informed and covers the history and philosopy of Open Source well. 

However it does suffer from being a collection of essays, and not a well structured book, and some of the analysis is a little superficial.  For a thorough treatment of the subject I recommend

The Success of Open Sourceby Steven Weber