December 2nd, 2007
Is Sun still a bully?
It takes sharp elbows to succeed in business. Open source is not supposed to be about sharp elbows.
Sun Microsystems, despite its embrace of open source as a concept, has retained its sharp elbows.
This is most especially true with regard to Java. Sun still treats Java as proprietary, despite its being open source. It succeeded in turning Red Hat around to its vision of Java. Sun’s unquestioned leadership is explicit in the agreement.
The elbow-throwing in such a corporate dance can be hidden by PR, and there’s incentive for both sides in making nice.
But individuals are different. So when Neil Wilson felt bullied over OpenDS, with his position at Sun terminated and his work sent to France, he wrote about it.
This gave Dave Shields a chance to detail, through links to his own blog, a host of elbow tosses by Sun regarding Java. Since placing Java under the GPL Sun has worked to take what amounts to proprietary control over all projects related to it.
I know Simon Phipps of Sun (left) will object to this view, and I hope he joins our discussion here. The publication of his colloquy with Wilson shows a degree of openness that would never exist in a proprietary project.
Yet the impression remains. And the question I would ask is whether this is really in Sun’s interest? It may seem paradoxical to assert that iron control of an open source project hurts it, but that’s the lesson of the last several years.
Has Sun really learned this?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 12/03/07
