Sun Developers Refute OpenSolaris Vaporware Claims

daria42 writes "It looks like an anonymous post on OSNews.com claiming OpenSolaris is vaporware was the last straw for two frustrated Sun Microsystems developers. They have responded furiously on their official Sun blogs, saying that they are currently working 'feverishly' on the project, and that it was taking so long because of the need to get rid of legal encumbrances to releasing the code. 'OpenSolaris certainly exists,' Sun kernel developer Alan Hargreaves says on his Sun blog. 'You only have to speak to anyone involved in getting it out there. There are a lot of us out there who both do and do not work for Sun.'"

osnews...

[Freggy]

Hey, give these guys a bit of time, will you? Sun developers, don't take it too personally, osnews is known for being the trolling site bu excellence in free software land.

What about a sample?

[Vo0k]

Following the standard FOSS policy "release often", release some parts of the system that are ready - some demon, some apps, and keep adding. Linux wasn't built in a day, and the first versions required Minix to compile it, it was a long process of creating it. Why not release OpenSolaris piece-by-piece, so people interested in it could start working on the non-encumbered parts?

Imagine this: I'm running commercial Solaris. I have some app provided by the system, that does the work in a realy kludgy way, with some of my custom wrapper scripts to let it work at all. I know I can fix it and make it work as it should with a few simple changes to the source of the app. I don't need whole OS. I need sources of this one single component. And they lay there on the harddrives of SUN employees, ready to release, waiting till some completely different parts are finished, and in the meantime I lose $1000 a day because the kludge doesn't do its job well enough. So why won't they release it?

Re:what month is it?

[Richard_at_work]

Slashdot as a community seems to have the opinion that if the announcement of something isnt accompanied by that something straight away, then its classed as vapourware, purely because slashdot bases its opinions on the workings of the opensource community, and that is completely unfair. If I announce an opensource project, I can immediately give anon read cvs access to the tree, regardless of whether theres anything in there. Sun cant do this tho, they have announced OpenSolaris to essentially placate the calls for opensourcing any and every closed source app that has been appearing in the community, and as the article states they need time to ensure theres no legal issues with the code. If Sun hadnt announced when they did, there would still be a lot of shouting down of Sun about an opensource solaris, even if Sun was doing this work in private. At least this way people get to know whats happening.

Re:For Now, It's Still Vaporware

[RealAlaskan]

Knowing Sun, they are not going for a "it barely works" first release. These guys are quite serious about maintaining correct code. This is one of the things that OSS does *not* excel in particularly.

You're right: a perfect first release isn't the way most Libre projects proceed. They put together something that shows how good it could be, if only it were complete, and worked, then release it as version 0.0.1, and get some help.

Sun seems to be trying to release a completed masterpiece. No help wanted, thanks very much.

It's sort of like the difference between making a bazarre, and making a cathedral. Gee, that's a great metaphor! Maybe I should write an anthropology paper about the different development methods around that. I could title it: ``Sun's bizarre development model will build a cold, empty cathedral, but they could have had a sunny, open bazarre.'' Maybe just ``The Cathederal and the Bazarre'' for short. I bet I'd be famous!

Re:For Now, It's Still Vaporware

[kenh]

Yes, I consider it vaproware, but this doesn't bother me at all. It fits the definition of vaporware. Sometime, after its release, then it won't fit that definition any more, but for now it does.

No, it doesn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware/ [wikipedia.org] It has not been announced with a certain release date that has been missed - IIRC, they have not announced a date certain that has been passed... If they had, you'd be right - but I think thye have not...

According to their roadmap http://www.opensolaris.org/roadmap/index.html [opensolaris.org] they plan to have a buildable release 2QCY05 (2nd quarter Calendar Year 2005) - which gives them until June 30th to do so. Any calls that OpenSolaris is Vaporware before then are premature...