April 7th, 2005
Inside the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board
The OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board (CAB) was announced this week, which will play a key role in how Sun’s unleashed Linux competitor evolves in the market of free software. The five member CAB includes two members from Sun–Simon Phipps, chief technology evangelist, and Caspar Dik, a senior staff engineer. Two members–Rich Teer, a consultant and author of the 1,200-page tome Solaris Systems Programming, and Al Hopper, an engineering consultant with Logical Approach– were elected by the early adopter OpenSolaris pilot community. Roy Fielding, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and chief scientist at Day Software, was selected by Sun as a representative from the open source community.
From left: Rich Teer, Jonathan Schwartz, Simon Phipps, Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Caspar Dik (Photo: Simon Phipps)
In this audio interview, which is available as both an MP3 download and as a podcast that you can have downloaded to your system and/or MP3 player automatically (see ZDNet’s podcasts: How to tune in), I talked with Phipps, Teer and Fielding about the CAB’s near term goals for the community. Fielding said the main outstanding issue is how to structure the community so it can make its own decisions (6:31), transitioning from Sun’s engineering and processes for making decisions to involving the community, similar to the Apache Software Foundation, but in a way that retains the corporate culture for quality and testing that Sun needs for its own products. Phipps also gives his explanation about why Java (a brand with a set of specifications) can’t be open sourced (16:11), but Fielding would like to see the entire Java Community Process open sourced (18:53)…
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
