Open Source comes from your heart, not your pocketbook!
I was reading Jonathan Schwartz' blog today and it made me realize of the various occasions when I worked at Sun Microsystems that management was content to keep me quiet.
From the start, Sun hired me as I lobbied for the Solaris community to keep Solaris on x86, which they had planned to indefinitely delay on Jan. 8th, 2002. On May 19th, 2003 Sun hired me as an evangelist and engineer within Solaris x86 Engineering. Later I would find out that Anil Gadre was pretty much the responsible person that tried to kill the product, but he would never admit it in the time I was there.
During my almost 6 years at Sun, there were many times I wanted to say what management wouldn't let me, even once they made me apologize to Roy Felding, for an honest comment I made to him...Roy Felding had said that Sun used him as free labor, a real shot at Sun. I never agreed that they should get people like Roy on the OpenSolaris Governing Board anyway, he knew nothing about Solaris. So, I made a comment to Roy, and I said, "While you may feel as if Sun used you as free labor, it wasn't without cost". My Director made me publicly apologize to Roy for that comment...why, I still am not sure of today...having a person like Roy on the board hurt more than it helped. Sure, Roy knows a lot about the Apache project, heck, some of the structure that needed to be changed only seemed like a copy of the Apache project anyway...a lot of help he was...most anyone can copy, it take talent to innovate. Maybe Roy innovated on the Apache project, but he sure didn't innovate for Sun.
But for some reason I never did mention the things Sun didn't want me to, and in fact, you could say that Sun management won out over me. They were successful in keeping me quiet so they were free to run the company in the toilet, and I think that in itself made them happy. It did keep me quiet while I was there though.
My evangelist side for Sun was to grow the open source community for OpenSolaris, but I never aligned with the people that ran those efforts, I was always like a black sheep inside Sun. The people that ran the OpenSolaris Community group were more fond of buying SWAG for community members so they could be marketing pawns...but people like me knew that people involved in open source were not so naive. Yet Sun's OpenSolaris Community group would go to all types of efforts to buy and give away SWAG. What a bunch of losers...a couple months ago I was at the SVOSUG user group meeting and they were giving out canvas bags that looked like a loin cloth with straps on it. When I mentioned that, some folks looked at me and said, "how can you look a gift horse in the mouth". We'll I'll tell you exactly how...I don't need to wear some loin cloth around advertising for Sun. I use OpenSolaris because I want to, not because they gave me some piece of SWAG. Clearly those folks don't get it.
Open source comes from your heart, not your pocketbook. The people who ran/run Sun's OpenSolaris Community group never could grok the fact that people of like interest like to get together and discuss said like interest with each other. They rarely, if at all, showed up to an OpenSolaris user group, they were absent in that regard. Most of the people who still run the OpenSolaris Community group today know nothing about a user community. Most of them only know about sitting in their office, hoping that they will still have a job tomorrow. Those people punch the clock in and sit at their desk, only to go home in the evening. In between they look for the next snazzy loin cloth to have Sun's logo printed on in hopes that community members will be the next marketing lemmings for them. More importantly they can show management what they have done for the OpenSolaris Community, which really amounts to very little if anything.
Open source comes from your heart, not your pocketbook, don't forget that...is it any wonder the OpenSolaris Community is failing? I think not...it still remains to be seen how serious Oracle will be to grow the user community. I don't see much effort yet and don't expect much...if anything the users will be lucky to get a new loin cloth with the Oracle logo on it...that way those people that work in the OpenSolaris Community group will feel like they've done something to grow the community.
Posted at 06:27PM Mar 09, 2010 by aland in General | Comments[0]