Submitted by A few months ago, Sun responded to criticism of its claims of being a transformed and open company. As part of their initiative to address this issue, they have opened a Wiki-based FOSS Open Hardware Documentation page working with individuals from the OpenBSD project and others. If you need documentation for Sun hardware, please post your request on the aforementioned page.
So to address the issue of insufficient documentation, Sun invited customers to… make it themselves?
did you even look at the link ?
No, they invited customers to tell them what documentation is missing. Now, you could argue that Sun knows which of its parts are in the field and which ones they’ve openly documented. But instead of exhaustively documenting everything, they require people to request specific documentation.
This saves Sun the effort of documenting hardware that nobody is interested in supporting, but it’s not the absolute best-case scenario for developers. Hopefully Sun will commit to open documentation for all of its new hardware going forward–without any pulling of teeth.
Progress is being made, and that’s always a good thing.
I’m not a big fan of Almafeta. And the post I’m responding to got moderated into oblivion. (I had to mod it up one before the system would even allow me to reply to it; Posts below -3 are now not eligible to receive replies.)
But I must say, as an OSS advocate, that it gave me a chuckle. Who of us has *not* encountered a cool OSS project, with fantastic code, and absolutely nonexistent documentation?
—
Project: We’re having *sooo* much fun coding! And our project is *soooo* cool!
Users: Yes. The project is cool. But the users have no documentation!
Project: Then let them read cake!
—
I’m not saying that Sun is like that. Not at all. But, like I say, it did give me a chuckle. Because Sun is trying to walk the “Open” walk. And docs have never been our strong suit. 😉
Edited 2007-08-28 23:09
“A few months ago, Sun responded to criticism of its claims of being a transformed an open company”
The first sentence doesn’t make sense. maybe it is suppose to be “claims of being a transformed open company”
If the OpenBSD devs are satisfied with the documentation provided by Sun (even in the form of a wiki), then it must be sufficient. The are some of the most relentless bastards when it comes to open specs; they do not make compromises.
The documentation is actually stored as PDFs on a variety of sites – the wiki is just for co-ordination and tracking.
Admittedly, I did not read the link, but I find it stupid that people take this opportunity to bash Sun. They may not have the best track record, and some people are still not satisfied with what they have done. I just wanted to defend Sun for helping the FOSS cause. If I did not get the facts straight, then my appologies.
What is that supposed to mean?
“Sun. They may not have the best track record”
Sun has the best track record of any big IT company that make HW and software (which excludes Red Hat then). Sun has made so much great technology available to so many people just to build good will it’s completely silly.
I don’t see IBM opening up DB2 nor Aix now do I?
Frankly Sun is more open than OSF, since Stallman always has his hidden agenda and Sun simply don’t (their agenda is obvious)
One can argue that a person or a company can always get better, but Sun is definitely in the top of being “Good guys”. Any claim of otherwise ought to be backed up by some facts rather than emotion!
Edit: To complete my statement here. Sun is working WITH OpenBSD team which are competitors for free to help them become more competitive to Suns own technology. Figure that one out
Edited 2007-08-28 05:38
There are a lot of hardware vendors that are a lot better than Sun.
This is an example of how it should be:
http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070430050134
Sun releases their stuff under their own licence, which makes it uncompatible with other licences.
Sun can get A LOT better.
Don’t be naive.
Sun is not helping FOSS, Sun is helping itself.
Being battered by Microsoft from one side and Linux from the other, and BSDs poking at their feet, Sun had no choice but to undertake a new direction.
Wisely they chose the FOSS side since Microsoft doesn’t “take prisoners”.
Of course they are thinking of themselves, they are a corporation. It just so happens that the tactics they have chosen, to opensource one of the most popular UNIX OSs out there as well as Java and other technologies, benefits everybody not just themselves.
Sure, they get allot of good will from the community for doing it and yes, it helps them not only develop and test they’re OS but at the end of the day, if SUN where ever to go belly up, mankind as a whole will still be able to benefit from technology that’s been years of development.
Let’s hope that, if just for the sake of technological cross pollination, SUN GPLs Solaris.
I’ve been helping dlg with this a bit, over the past few months. It’s been a fairly long process, but persistence and carefully crafted communication has definitely helped.
I, for one, am very happy that http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home is up and running, and when I’ve got time I’m adding links for OpenSolaris implementations of support for the chips and chipsets listed.
And instead of using the myriad of OpenSource Wiki’s available they have settled on Atlassian Confluence, a proprietary Wiki…
To be fair though I like how transparent they are bing with this even giving a status where things are not yet released; “Engineering review complete”, “Under legal review”. This is better than i’ve seen in the OpenSolaris community where it’s often coming “soon”, Sun Labs being the main offendor.
Edited 2007-08-27 22:40
We use Confluence in our company extensively, and it kicks ass. IMHO, it is better then open source alternatives i have seen so far, especially in terms of ease of use, installation and maintenance. Plus it is Java, so they eat their own dog food.
You should understand one more thing, Sun is giving this service for free, but this is not free for Sun. And for them having a commercially supported product is possibly cheaper then using an not commercially supported open source alternative.
Cheers.
There is broad industry support for MediaWiki and it is commercially supported so that argument is Null, I know of several installations in large corporates.
I don’t doubt that confluence is a great product and that Sun should it eat its own dog food…is their dog food open source or Java (Java is a part of their product line, OSS is part of their strategy)?
Of course it’s not free for Sun, this is obvious…and Simon’s reasons shed light on the situation which is wholly acceptable.
MediaWiki is not, by far, > *
If you’re the FOSS advocate you sound like yu are, you would still respect the right of anyone to choose what software they use instead of coming off like a kook who habitually reads way too far into things.
The wiki I’m using for this is simply the one Sun makes available to employees for general use. If I’d had budget and staff to run my own I would have used Free software, trust me.
Thanks for the info Simon. It’s great to see this technology being used more in F500 companies…and the transparency is very much appreciated by customers and community alike.
Edited 2007-08-28 00:58
I must say that it is a step in the right direction.
Good job by dlg@ and hopefully this will help several OS projects to write better support for newer sparcs.
There will always be negative sentiments. But Sun has opened an enormous codebase, and has been good to opensource the last years. So, here is a warm “thank you!”.
Maybe we will get SMP for sparc64 in OpenBSD soon thanks to this co-operation?
What I have heard about SMP in Sparc64 in OpenBSD is not an issue about information, I think it’s only a matter of knowledge and time from developers since this hasn’t gotten very high priority. We will see what this will lead to =)
well I wouldn’t use mediawiki for anything. moinmoin or trac if I was force to. if you’ve seen the parser you would agree. I even tried to reimlement the parser in C haha. with virtualy no management console/tools mediawiki is the vry last thing to try. YMMV.
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