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Our Blogs Open Sauce Hey FOSS project, what's your pedigree? | Hey FOSS project, what's your pedigree? |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 20 June 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 That's probably why OpenSUSE has not set the Thames on fire. Had it been created by its original German founder, it would definitely have been much more of a success. But it came into being in 2005, two years after SuSE was bought by Novell, a company which has no pedigree when it comes to free or open source software. OpenSUSE is a good distribution - it has a fine pedigree of its own - but its parent company has none. That's why, two-and-a-half years after being set up, the recently appointed community manager, Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, is trumpeting claims that with the release of version 11, the project is coming into its own. (The coverage itself appears to be somewhat stage-managed given that the website providing it is the same one that Brockmeier ran for some time.) According to the article, OpenSUSE is still trying to work out how its community operates. It does not surprise me. The fact that Novell, which is best known for signing a patent deal with Microsoft in November 2006, is behind the project, has much to do with OpenSUSE's lack of mindshare. As far as that deal goes, while some people believe, (like the American president), that it's time to move on, there is a much bigger number who have long memories. Given this background, it is not surprising that OpenSolaris is often viewed as a desperate measure by Sun Microsystems to, in T'so's words, "try to save Solaris from being viewed as irrelevant." OpenSolaris is well and truly non-organic, a contrived project. It is a bid to gain mindshare by being labelled "open source" while maintaining the bureaucracy of a proprietary model. To use an earthier term, Sun wants to be half-pregnant. The project is so tied up in its own bowels, trying to draft structures for its own operation, that the only thing it has left to chance is probably the order in which members of the governing board break wind - and in which minor key they do so. I wouldn't be surprised if even that was specified in an amendment some years down the line. Finally, I come to what I call genetically modified free software. This is free code - orginally written and given away by people - grabbed by proprietary companies and buried within their own products. It loses its soul, its DNA is lost, it is grafted and becomes part of the body to which it is grafted. Whatever tweaks the proprietary company makes are never going to benefit the wider community.
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