It should be obvious, but the more I talk to people about open source, and where and how it's useful, the more I'm surprised by how overinflated (or underinflated) expectations often are for open source.
One case in point is with the utility of source code as a way to save time and money, rather than reinventing the wheel. For example, Alfresco, my employer, was able to get its initial content management product to a 1.0 state in less than six months because it heavily borrowed from successful open-source projects such as Hibernate, Spring, PDFbox, and others.
However, as Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds notes in a recent interview, it's not always that easy. Speaking of the possibility of including Sun's OpenSolaris code in Linux, the Torvalds remarks:
One of the problems is that taking code from other projects is hard. You can't take the code as is, right? Solaris is very different in many areas from Linux, so if you take Solaris code, you have to fix it for all the differences.
Quite often, it's actually more work to try to take code from another project than it would be to just write it yourself from the start, from scratch.
In some cases, it's worth the effort, but it is effort. For those who think that adopting open-source software is easy, you clearly haven't been involved in it for very long.
Open source doesn't make development or business easier. It's a different way of doing development that has its own significant benefits and some downsides. I think that it leads to superior code, but don't expect the road to be smooth.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
CORRECTION at 6:30 a.m. PDT September 2: This blog inadvertently had linked to old information about Google's work with OpenSolaris. However, having discovered the mistake, the author realizes how salient the content is to Google's announcement Monday of its new browser.
Two years ago, Computerworld reported that Google was actively testing Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris Unix distribution as a possible adjunct operating system to be used internally with its existing modified Linux distribution. While I'm sure there continues to be active experimentation at Google around OpenSolaris, I suspect any move away from Linux remains highly unlikely, at least in the short term.
In a similar vein, Monday's news of Google's creation of a new Web browser--Chrome--may not spell the end of Google's cozy relationship with the Firefox browser either.
According to the 2006 Computerworld article:
Sources outside Google of said that its servers currently run a stripped-down version of Red Hat Linux that has been modified by the company's engineers. A Solaris systems administrator who recently interviewed for a job at Google said that he was told by employees there that the search engine vendor plans to create and test its own modified version of OpenSolaris....
Switching to OpenSolaris would be a natural move for Google, which has a large number of former Sun employees and is striving to push the performance of its data centers, (technology consultant Stephen) Arnold said. But he added that he doubts Google is widely deploying OpenSolaris yet. "Will it quickly replace Linux anytime soon? No," he said.
Exactly. Google is the performance king, and so it might have been willing to make a bet on OpenSolaris that others (like eBay and Yahoo) also made. Solaris has long been considered the gold standard for performance.
But two years later, Google has yet to broadly embrace OpenSolaris. Google isn't one to take the short-term view on performance. Linux has a strong, vibrant community dedicated to improving its performance and extending its reach. OpenSolaris, while a great project, still lacks this widespread community involvement. In Linux, Google benefits from the contributions of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Red Hat, and others. With OpenSolaris? It would be more of a solo act.
This is just one reason I think that Chrome is unlikely to displace Firefox in Google's affections, at least anytime soon. OpenSolaris (and Chrome) may have technical superiority to offer them, but they have nothing to offer in terms of market momentum. And Google knows how to read the momentum tea leaves.
Ted T'so writes an excellent analysis of Sun Microsystems' attempts to build a community around its Open Solaris project. In so doing, he ends up uncovering a much larger issue: The difficulty of getting community development around projects that are hosted and serve corporations.
But first, the critique:
...(I)f you run into a Sun salescritter or a Sun CEO claiming that OpenSolaris is just like Linux, it's not. Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community. Maybe it will be someday, as some Sun executives have claimed, but it's definitely not a priority by Sun; if it was, it would have been done before now. And why not? After all, they are getting all of the marketing benefit of claiming that Solaris is "just like Linux", without having to deal with any of the messy costs of working with an outside community.
Probably fair, but let's assume that Sun really, really, really wants to have outside developers contribute to Open Solaris? What's keeping that back (other than apparently poor developer tools, which he describes). As he writes in response to Brian Akers' distinction between "sponsored" (corporate) and non-sponsored communities:
... Read moreOver the years, Sun has been progressively pushed by the open-source community to open up. OpenOffice, Java, etc.: the company's efforts to embrace open source have never been quite enough for some.
For Valentine's Day this year, Sun received another arrow, this time from Roy Fielding, co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server Project, who quit Sun to protest its alleged inability to relax its control over OpenSolaris and truly forge a community around it. As Fielding notes:
Sun didn't just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris; they made promises about it being an open development project. That's the only way they could get someone like me to provide free labor for their benefit.
Sun agreed that 'OpenSolaris' would be governed by the community and yet has refused, in every step along the way, to cede any real control over the software produced or the way it is produced, and continues to make private decisions every day that are later promoted as decisions for this thing we call OpenSolaris.
As Stephen O'Grady notes, this isn't a huge blow to Sun's OpenSolaris project, because Fielding doesn't have the same role within it as Linus Torvalds does with Linux. Still, it's yet another voice suggesting that Sun has much to learn about community, something on which its friends and critics alike seem to agree.
This is all the more troubling because Sun seems to want to embrace development communities. There may be a disconnect between "want" and "need," or between executive desire and company culture. I don't know.
One thing is clear: Sun needs to figure this out sooner rather than later. Perhaps letting the MySQL team run amok would help.
Sun is increasingly one of the industry's most interesting open-source companies, and confirmed its ambitions on Monday during an "open source at Sun" day. At the show (which, unfortunately, I couldn't attend as I'm on vacation) Sun offered an update on its open source plans, including GlassFish, OpenSolaris, and other projects.
I particularly found this Java/language project interesting:
... Read more
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