More Sun news: Sun promises to open-source Java

[Anders Karlsson]

On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 21:23 +1000, Alexander Jacob Tsykin wrote:
> On Sunday 21 May 2006 21:02, Pete Ryland wrote:
> > The whole world can now improve on it and maybe even make it work, and port
> > it to other platforms; they may actually acheive their goal of write once,
> > run anywhere!
> I don't think that they really want people to be writing source cod for them, 
> and I don't honestly think that people will. For example, nobody really the 
> uses the rpm code, even though redhat has open sourced it. They use the 
> application, but the code doesn't seem to get used (please correct me if I'm 
> wrong). Another well known one is yast in suse, again nobody really uses that 
> code. A third example is the HP printer drivers.

Yeah, they said that about the kernel, StarOffice (OO.o), open{ssh,ssl},
gcc and glibc as well. The thing is, when people find something they can
contribute to, and they feel strongly enough about, they do.

If Sun had treated Java in the same fashion that the Linux kernel is,
they would have had contributions not just from end-users, but from
companies like MicroSoft and IBM as well.

As for RPM, how do you know how many contributions there are to it from
outside RedHat? There are several large distributions aside from RedHat
that uses RPM, and I'd wager they feed fixes and enhancements back
(after the 29th, I can verify that from source).
YaST is a different animal, because it deals with the configuration and
administration side of the distribution, something distributions have
different ideas about how to do.
I don't know enough about the HP printer drivers to comment on them. 

> It seems that most of the time when companies open source something, people 
> trust them to program it.

Some people do, some people don't. The answer is, it depends on a lot of
things. Companies that open-source software and that has no history of
doing so, *may* appear not to value contributions at first, because they
have a transition period where they have to get used to contributions
from the outside, where they have to learn how to work with non-staff.

Regards,

-- 
Anders Karlsson <trudheim at gmail.com>
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