Does this Open Source license make me look fat?

The idea behind the OpenSolaris initiative is a nice thing in theory. However the reality is that without the ‘community’ to pick it up and run with it, it’s little more than a cool idea at this point. Sun has to understand that there’s a lot more to a successful Open Source project than just having an Open Source ’styled’ license available.

Sun Microsystems uncrated its OpenSolaris initiative today, releasing the code base under Sun’s Common Development and Distribution License — an open source license based the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1. For Sun, which has been talking about opening Solaris for months (see “Wicked, tricksy, false! WE hates GPL! Noooo, GPL’s my friend!” and “Solaris 10: free as in “can I interest you in this service contract?”), the move is a watershed event — one it hopes will kick start the Solaris community. And “hope,” as many an observer has pointed out, is the operative word here. “Providing Solaris source code under some recognized open-source license is one thing,” Dan Kusnetzky, IDC’s program vice president for system software, told eWeek. “It’s quite another thing to build an active community around a specific code base.” Mark Webbink, Red Hat’s associate general counsel agreed. “It’s not about the license, it’s about the community,” he said. “So how is Sun going to instantly attract hundreds or thousands of developers to Solaris when they have never had the opportunity to work with the source code before? Red Hat has experienced this before with some of the companies we have acquired,” said Webbink. “It is much harder to build a community around pre-existing software than one might believe, and until such a community exists and then is making the bulk of the enhancements to the code base, the technology largely remains a Sun proprietary product.”