Eduardo,
thank you for clarifying the situation and explaining my position (which
you excellently summarised).
As I am doing open source for longer time than GlassFish exists, I think
it is not overbearing if I explain a bit the situation out of the view
of an open source campaigner.
Open Source campaigners have a vision of open source that has nothing to
do with source code. It has to do with democracy. For "us", open source
means an enterprise (not necessarily a software project), best described
by the following "rules":
* Open Source is about community value, not about company turnover.
(According to that rule, many contributors spend lots of valueable time
and money into their projects without getting anything back but just the
good feeling of having done a great work.)
(According to that rule, it is Sun's problem that they like or need to
finance their contributions in some way. The other contributors also
must eat every day, but they do not necessarily buy bread from working
on GlassFish. Resulting is the idea that Sun must pay us to test drive
their contributions and bug reports *IF* we would have to pay for Sun to
fix those and promptly publish the fixes, as they also pay their
internal test team to do the same job. "We" also have to make an income
somehow, and our time is also worth getting paid. We are no hobbyists.)
* A contribution is a donation and belongs to all contributors.
(According to that rule, as soon as Sun publishes code, it is no more
Sun's code and alls contributors have the same rights and
responsibilities. GlassFish is no more Sun's project or code, it is the
project and code of the community, as a contribution is a donation. A
donation is not a donation if you expect to get anything back for it.).
* All stakeholders are equal. No one has more rights than others. All
role owners are democratically elected.
(According to that rule, many open source projects have public
discussion forums for even the most technical details and do elections
of all project roles. From this point of view it is not acceptable that
Sun dictates the project leaders. Often "open source companies" hire
people that already are elected, instead of placing their current
employees into the role since they think it is "their" product, while
actually it already was donated to the community. This does not mean
that I think that anybody does a bad job at Sun, it is just a
description of the point of view.)
* All decisions are public and found by consensus.
(According to that rule, any architectural or design question has to be
discussed in the mailing list and is not to be decided by a single
stakeholder. Explicitly it is not Oracle's sole decision whether to
change EclipseLink's architecture or not, as long as there are
contributors willing to provide this).
* The Global Village
(According to that rule, management must be done in a way that allows
everybody to participate without overly stressing him. Due to that,
there often are no meetings and schedules, but agile work plans and the
using of public discussion forums and voting systems. Yes, this means
that many things are more expensive to reach and need longer time to
market. But open source is not about making money, it is about a
community reaching a target.)
I hope that this view makes it more clear why people try to get more
influence on the project management. It is not about being displeased
with Sun's people, but with Sun's and Oracle's policy of "being the boss
by definition" from a more fundamental position of open source in
general. It is not about starting a revolution and kicking out anybody
of his role or position, it is about getting ASKED about our opinion to
a lot of architectural, technical and management questions (including
things like marketing, release schedules, when to publish bug fixes, and
so on). One example: From my point of view, Sun's decision to delay
publication of bug fixes to a months later release, is incompatible with
the idea (not the pure text) of the GPL. The discussion about this
should be not inside of Sun, but inside of the community, since the bug
fix is basing on the community's (not Sun's) code (Sun did donate it,
from the view of open source people, so they gave up right of
ownership); as a result, it is the community's decision when a derived
work (which is a bug fix) is to be published (since it is the community
that provides the licence to create such a fix basing on the GlassFish
code, it is not Sun). I think you got the point.
From this view the problems arise, and there are people coming to
GlassFish that live in THAT world (which might be strange and foreign to
Sun and Oracle). Those people, including "the idiot", see that Sun
announces "open source" but not provide what the above axioms do
pretent. I know that Sun is working hard to make it happen. But that is
not the point. The point is, the fact that it is not yet reached, makes
the open source campaigners angry, since it looks like "stealing" the
"brand" of open source for a commercial use. An some of them then are
not willing to write explanations like this one (explaining mostly while
I am advocating "the idiot"), they just write "F* You All", just as
Greenpeave writes a slogan on a nuclear power plant like "You will kill
us all" and gets called "Eco Terrorists" for it.
Regards
Markus
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eduardo.Pelegrillopart_at_sun.com
> [mailto:Eduardo.Pelegrillopart_at_sun.com] On Behalf Of Eduardo Pelegri-
> Llopart
> Sent: Donnerstag, 23. Juli 2009 20:01
> To: users_at_glassfish.dev.java.net
> Subject: Bug Fixing, Support, German Laws, etc... (was: GLASSFISH IS
> LAME)
>
> Hi Markus.
>
> You and I exchanged emails on this general topic a week ago but others
> may need additional background to understand your perspective on bug
> fixing and support, so, trying to capture that in a couple of
> paragraphs...
>
> Markus' context is that there are laws in Germany that require
consumer
> products to be free of defects. He interprets that to say that a
> customer of a software product must be given free fixes for all
> "critical" bugs in the product. Sun includes that in our commercial,
> for-fee, GlassFish offering, but Markus says it should apply to the
> free
> distribution also. Sun commits to push all commercial bug fixes to
the
> next free/public distribution, but the isolated, sustaining bug fixes
> are not available _separately_ before that.
>
> It is a bit more complicated than that, and IANAL, etc, but I think
> that
> gives some background.
>
> There is also a separate topic about what is a P1; I think that needs
> to
> be addressed better.
>
> From our perspective, much of this boils down to different ways to
> balance the needs of Sun, who is contributing many people to deliver
> GlassFish, with the needs of non-paying users, paying customers, and
> developers and partners.
>
> There are other ways of balancing things. RedHat, Covalent, MySQL,
> JasperSoft, etc, etc, they all use different mechanisms to balance the
> needs of all these stakeholders.
>
> So far, I think most people in the GlassFish community have been happy
> with the tradeoffs we have been following: we have been delivering
free
> good quality releases in a regular fashion, while building the next
> generation v3 product and providing "support" to users and customers.
> The last few months have been a bit extra tricky with summer, Oracle,
> JavaOne, etc, but hopefully we are getting back to our normal cycles.
>
> Hope this helps,
> - eduard/o
>
>
> Markus Karg wrote:
> >> Do you have any idea what open source stands for?
> >> I am a long time believer in open source. And I have nothing
against
> >> paying for support on open source products that actually show
> promise.
> >
> > I think nobody has a problem with paying good money for good
support.
> But with GlassFish's P1 bugs it is different. Those bug reports have
> been investigated in long and expensive research by the users (they
did
> not get money for that from Sun or anybody else), and it should be
fair
> that those users get the bug fix for free, too. I do not see bug
fixing
> as a "support".
> >
> > Regards
> > Markus
> >
>
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