osOpinion: Is Sun Missing The Point?

[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]

“Why would Sun do this? SUNW is a pretty mature organization
with a pretty solid organization, and they tend to be pretty sharp
cookies. I expect they looked at their market sector facts: Anyone
who can afford a SparcStation is not concerned with price, and the
sorts of tasks put to Sun hardware is not really a popular domain
for code sharing. Full freedom and free cost are just not perceived
as important in their domain.”

“Think: Why do people switch from Solaris to Linux?”

“According to the survey done in 1996 by Bob Young en route to
building up RedHat, the reason has nothing to do with freedom to
re-distribute, or in leveraging community effort to build something
greater than would be possible by any one proprietary effort. The
“many eyes make shallow bugs” rule simply does not apply. Let’s
face facts: Solaris is not really in need of major development,
corrections or enhancements. Solaris is a very mature and respected
technology, and not something your average graduate CS student
might improve. (ok, maybe, but that is beside the point).”

“No, the reason for the Sun decision is not to improve
Solaris, nor is it to appease any religious ‘checklist’ dogma.
Plain and simple: Bob Young’s survey found people choosing Linux
because they could “get under the hood.” I can cite several big
contracts Sun lost because their client’s engineers could not see
or modify the source code.”

Complete
Story