Screaming Penguin

I have just read this article about the recent blog war between SUN's Jonathan Schwartz and RedHat's Tielman. I must that I am a bit annoyed by this war of words and for various reasons. First of all, I am pissed off that there is a blog war with SUN in which I have no part to play. It annoys me given my long nasty history there. In this particular case, I am actually more on the side of SUN. RedHat is really out of line in its criticism of SUN. They should look at themselves. I have several problems with the RH position and how they claim to represent the open source community with sentences such as, "We the open source community". * SUN is right to call RH on this. Today RH *IS* a proprietary vendor. Their whole business is around proprietary wrappers to Open Source Linux to drive the subscription business. * RH is a PACKAGER, not a technology house. How do they DARE call SUN on technology innovation. SUN by all measures has been a star in technology. SUN created more technology over the years than RH ever will, JAVA, NFS (open source) etc. RH is a packager, it doesn't create JACK, it doesn't create Linux, it wraps it up in proprietary shit. And no the contributions that they make don't really count. Linus Torvalds creates Linux. * RH likes to pretend they are the open source community, waiving its flag. While this used to impress Wall Street it doesn't impress us. RH is really a LINUX PACKAGER (and a proprietary one at that), today the Open Source != Linux. MySQL and JBoss are the new stack players up from the operating system. Don't speak for me. * Instead of asking SUN to open source java, why doesn't RH create the best VM for linux? that would boost the adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Today Windows is still a better platform to deploy Java, period. Oh yeah, I forgot, RH doesn't actually create any significant technology. * Professional Open Source, a la JBoss/mySQL, to me is the real open source. We professionalize our communities and make money FOR OURSELVES AND OUR FAMILIES not for some greedy 3rd party packager. * But what really gets me is this: Our own talks with RH broke down, RH is NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF PAYING OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPERS, we are, that is why we created JBoss inc. RH wanted to keep the services revenues all to themselves. That is the dirty little secret, so for them to come out and claim they are the open source when we know the reality is distasteful. How can RedHat have the guts to say they represent the open source community when they balked at a simple deal with us where the actual developers of open source would make money (aka professional open source)? Companies such as HP, Novell, CA and Unisys are today our partners, and don't balk at paying us, in fact they are happy to do so as it keeps the open source communities we sponsor healthy and running. Not to say that I completely side with Mr Schwartz on this one. We have had our differences with SUN in the past and still today in the field they try to compete with us in sales (emphasis on "try to"). SUN is always a bit hypocritical when talking about open source, just like IBM is. These companies embrace open source where and when it enables them to compete against MSFT but when it comes to their own beef (do you see IBM open sourcing DB2/Websphere?) they show their true colors, and trust me it isn't pretty. We know, we deal with the "real politik" side of this every day in our sales organizations. So to me both SUN and RH are open source "wannabees", or as one of my developers put "open source girly men". They all want to represent themselves as "friends" of open source. One thing that Tielman is right about is that "open source doesn't care about you". I agree, stop talking in our name, today it is a mosaic of people and models. We push our "professional open source" model. We think of ourselves as the "REAL open source". We are open source professionals that make a good living at it, built companies out it. We are not third party packagers fleecing open source developers and refusing to pay them or corporate entities desperate for some buzz and OSS credibility. WE ARE IT! marcf PS: So my wish came true and I joined the blog war in the press. ZDnet covers these points in a radio interview.