Beyond Open

Monday I spoke, twice, at Open Sources, Open Standards, in Arizona. Tuesday I gave the morning keynote at the Sun Open Source Summit, an internal company event held at Sun's San Jose campus (the old Agnews buildings and grounds, which have been beautifully maintained). Both events were sponsored by Sun. Both featured other speakers, from various open source and open standards communities. I'm sure the word "open" was uttered hundreds, or even thousands, of times at both events. As usual, there were disagreements and lamentations over meanings and lack of the same.

I've been around the tech business since the Seventies (or, if you count the tech end of broadcasting, the Sixties). And I still haven't heard a good, much less a final, definition of "open". Dictionary.com has no less than eighteen definitions: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=open. But none keep us from gargling spit on the particulars.

The Open Source Definition, from the Open Source Initiative, provides a useful -- even canonical -- reference for those looking for licensing criteria. But for many, myself included, licensing is eye-glaze. It's important, but it's also fine print. Reading fine print is torture for me. Every cell in my body screams "We have lawyers for this!" And I am not alone.

Worse, "open" arguments are conversational quicksand. In an introductory talk about open source given at the Sun summit, conversation quickly degenerated into licensing minutae. I had to leave because I had nothing to contribute, and my allergy to The Whole Thing was making my brain throb.

Maybe there are numbers somewhere (I doubt it, but if anybody knows, tell me), but it's a certainty that growth in the use of Linux far outpaces growth in the number of people who care about licenses. This is significant, because the traditional Linux Community has always been populated by the latter group.

Yet it was clear to me that when people talked at these meetings about "the Linux community" and "the open source community", they tended to mean "everybody who uses Linux" and "everybody who uses open source". Not in every case, but in most, they used "community" when they meant "category" or "market" (used as a synonym for "category" as well).

Linux, however, is now so commonly used as infrastructural building material that it makes as much sense to talk about home builders as "the two-by-four community" or high-rise construction as "the steel I-beam community".

To Sun's credit, they *really* want to talk about the subject, especially since they clearly intend to open-source (used as a verb) Solaris, the company's proprietary Unix operating system. (An announcement to that effect went out on Tuesday.)

The political issues involved with open-sourcing a product like Solaris are unavoidably huge, both within the company and out in the marketplace. Equally unavoidable is the temptation to cover Solaris' coming-out in terms of sports and war. Expect lots of stories like, "Solaris and Linux fight it out for control of the enterprise!"

Here's what I'd like to try instead.

Let's say Sun open-souces Solaris in some way that's acceptable to the traditional community. For example, by adopting one of the OSI's approved licenses or writing one that passes OSI's muster. Now what? Where does Solaris fit, then? Where will Linux, Solaris and other open source operating systems work best? What will Solaris contribute to the ecosystem we call the marketplace?

Bear in mind that the big-systems business is truly huge (the service sector alone adds up to 3-digit $billions), and much of it isn't even close to the part of the Net-attached world where Linux and open source have made the deepest inroads. In other words, it's virgin territory for open source.

Consider what an open Solaris might mean for R0ml Lefkowitz' famous Six Missing Open Source Projects, which are all in big-systems categories. <http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7584> Would open Solaris raise the possibility that some of those projects might happen?

What would a more open-source-friendly Sun mean for the marketplace as well? Consider Sun's success already in the mobile phone category. Jonathan Schwartz reports that there are now 350 million Java-enabled mobile phones, and 1.7 billion Java-enabled devices in total. Could Sun/Java/Solaris work alongside Linux/Trolltech/Whomever to drive the whole mobile manufacturing and infrastructure categories in a more open direction? <http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040905#volume_wins>

When I suggested, in my keynote, that Sun could take the lead in bringing producer-consumer symmetry to Internet radio over mobile phones (one subject of my last Suitwatch: http://www.ssc.com/pipermail/suitwatch/2004-September/000079.html), I watched lots of faces in the audience light up.

While we're at it, why should Open be the only virtue, and Source be the only issue? There are other issues, such as symmetry, transparency, freedom, and the protection of the Net itself from market-limiting legislation and regulatory rulemaking: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6989

There are many fights left. The ones most worth fighting are against common enemies. Not each other.