Wednesday, 28 November 2007
Does OpenDS need a fork
« Audio/slides of Pat Patterson on Digital Identity, SSO, LDAP, Liberty, etc | Main | Hello, Android »This is a pretty disturbing read. Early on I voiced my concerns that maybe OpenDS was only pseudo-open source. This seems to confirm that. Maybe we made the right technical choice in using it, but maybe we do need to consider the community aspects a little more closely in our technology choices. Alex K. can laugh at me now...if only the ApacheDS build and config process wasn't ass.
PS. Who in their right mind would relocate open source development to Europe right now...from a financial standpoint the move seems...stupid (anyone notice the Euro vs Dollar right now)...not to mention the "IK" factor...Sun never seems to miss an opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot.
UPDATE: my original post had a broken link (ref is not valid ;-) )... This is fixed. The "IK" factor is a Marc Fleuryism that explained why...a certain company...got it wrong...if I recall correctly. JBoss did not need "Intellectual Property" IP because we had "Intellectual Knowledge". Meaning we had all the guys who wrote the thing and had been working in it and knew RIGHT where the ins and outs of the code were without having to even look at it. Building a new open source developer is really actually very expensive. Losing a good one for no reason is not cheap. I say "no reason" because Sun is doing this to...SPEND EUROS as opposed to DOLLARS? Where is THAT business sense. The importance of co-location is greatly diminished in open source. It might not be 0 but certainly isn't worth the loss of IK, relationships and good will. I'm hoping Marc picks this up and expounds on "IK" a bit.
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hi there,
"This is a pretty disturbing read"
can you give a link ?
thank you,
BR,
~A
http://anil-identity.blogspot.com/2007/11/story-of-opends-and-departing-neil.html
Andy, rare occurrence that we blogged almost at the same time on the same topic.
I've been investigating. There's an HR dimension that I can't discuss in public, but the substantive issue for the FOSS community is unrelated to the reduction-in-force layoff the employees in question were unfortunately subjected to.
So far I have found that the substantive issue seems to be about the fact a unilateral change of the governance was made[1] by Sun employees, without involving either the community or Sun management. All Sun's representative did was ask for that unauthorised change to be reverted. We might argue over the actual governance later, but the issue now is that the change was made. It was wrong for it to be made without consultation, and Sun was in my view right to ask for it to be reverted (that's all that has happened BTW[2]).
[1] http://tinyurl.com/ys5hf3
[2] http://tinyurl.com/yto9qs
hi there,
What is the "IK" factor ?
thank you,
BR,
~A