I was at an event on Thursday when I met with a person from Sun. I last met him about a year or so ago and after all the pleasantries, he asked if I am still with Red Hat. I said, yes, of course. Things are getting to be increasingly fun. He then went on to ask what I have to say about OpenSolaris. Before I could answer, he said, “hey OpenSolaris has already forked, isn’t great!”. What? Forking it is great? I said that forking is not a good thing to which he said that Red Hat, Mandriva, Novell are all forks of Linux. I corrected him but somehow he felt unconvinced. I said that forking the code is not a good thing as it will not necessarily make things better. Sigh.
not a good thing yes, unless he refers to the popularity of opensolaris.
I think Solaris is good. My concern is that, unlike Linux, OpenSolaris is forking and therefore dissipating the opportunity for them to create a community. Communities are a funny thing – it is not held together by financial incentives, promotions etc. It is the social glue of respect and “doing the right thing”. When you do not allow a community to emerge, you effectively have negated the possible success of the project.