OpenSolaris Governing Board Resigns

webmink.com

64 points·bensummers··6 comments

Goodwill is part of the value of company. Oracle had the chance to produce goodwill for the company with relatively little cost.

The backlash that this and other actions will cause will cost Oracle real money. Some customers at least will be more reluctant in using Oracle's offerings. I'm sure the Oracle suits considered that risk, but I think in going forward with this they made a mistake.

Time will tell.

sad day.

Did the OGB ever govern anything? I don't understand why it was formed in the first place.

I believe it was Sun's attempt to say, "see, we can open-source stuff. We believe in the importance of 'community'".

I think the idea was to kinda do something like the JCP for Solaris. Give the OpenSolaris community some kind of formal access to the decision making process. I'm not sure that it ever actually worked, and if they were indeed using the JCP as a template, I doubt it ever would have.

Like you said though, I'm not sure that they ever really did anything or had any pull whatsoever.

A lot of folks were worried about the future of Sun's open source offerings, and it seems this might be the beginning of the end.

Or it could be the start of the community building something from the Solaris source?

Here's a blog post from Peter Tribble, one of the ex-OGB members: http://ptribble.blogspot.com/2010/08/new-light.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com