A high-profile figure in Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris community has quit, accusing Sun of retaining too much control over the open-source counterpart to its Solaris operating system.
Roy Fielding, co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server Project and a key contributor to the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), announced his resignation last week in a message on the community's discussion forum.
"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," he wrote in the message dated Feb. 14.
That hasn't happened, Fielding argued.
"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," he wrote.
OpenSolaris consists of an open-source code base, tools and a community of developers, not an end-user-ready distribution. Various distributions employing OpenSolaris have been released.
Sun should adopt the governing style of MySQL, the open-source database company Sun is acquiring, Fielding wrote. "That company doesn't pretend to let their community participate in decisions, and yet they still manage to satisfy most of their users. ... There's nothing particularly wrong with that choice -- it is a perfectly valid open source model for corporations that don't need active community participation."
Fielding did not respond to a request for additional comment.
Terri Molini, an OpenSolaris advocacy contributor at Sun, responded to Fielding in a prepared statement Wednesday.
"As a consultant, Roy was extremely helpful during the inception of the OpenSolaris community as well as an original member of the [OpenSolaris Governing Board]. His involvement with the community and his contributions in the creation of the governance model were invaluable. Sun wishes him well in all of his endeavors," she wrote.
"Open source technologies have many stakeholders and Sun is working with as many communities as possible to create an open source distribution of OpenSolaris," she continued. "We recognize that we will not be able to please everyone as we move through this process and in some cases, we'll have to agree to disagree on some points."
One close observer of OpenSolaris had a mixed reaction to Fielding's decision.
"There's a controversy here, there's a flare-up, it looks bad, but the commentary itself is not unprecedented in the open-source community," said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with Redmonk.
Given Fielding's status as a technologist, his departure will have some effect but won't cripple the project, O'Grady said. "Certainly it's a [public relations] hit. ... But this isn't Linus Torvalds leaving Linux."
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Comments
I find O'Grady's assessment of the situation flawed. She's looking at OpenSolaris from a shareholders perspective, in that it affects "Public Relations". That's a fundamental contradiction of an open source project - open source projects should be driven by the best possible features to achieve your set goals... good public relations should come from good software.
The big failure in her assessment is that she doesn't acknowledge the "black mark" the move by Roy gives to an open source project. There are a lot of interesting things developers want to work on, and open source is a great outlet to that - but stifling secretive decision making processes are not something interesting to work on by any means.
I see nowhere in the whole publicity statement an acknowledgment of fault with their processes. Maybe there isn't anything wrong with their approach, but I'm willing to bet for a high profile person to leave in such a way there are some serious issues at play here. If they are serious about a good end product, they should seek to learn from these things, rather then apply the PR bandaid. A good metaphor is a parent with a sick kid, "Take the medication, it tastes bad, but will make you better."
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