Our focus this week has been the Open Source Program Office (OSPO). While at Sun Microsystems, Simon led their OSPO and this week he got the team back together, including original founder Danese Cooper, to write about what they all did during the decade the Sun Open Source Program Office existed. This was a very popular article and it’s been read thousands of times this week. There’s scope to zoom in on specific topics mentioned in this article – let us know which would interest you.
Continue readingTag Archives: Sun
What Did Sun’s OSPO Do?
Started in 1999 and established as an official corporate function in 2005, Sun’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) was among the first in the industry and maybe the first to use the name.
As I’ve discussed in earlier posts, corporations are the vehicle for the collective expression of many individuals. However, to the outside world they are a monolith, and are expected to be consistent as well as predictable in their actions. With the many varied, implicit expectations and explicit obligations that different open source projects have, transforming a company’s reputation into that of a good actor in open source is a complex task. It’s also a necessary one if you expect other actors to invest their time and work in your project, or to give you influence in steering a project together.
Continue readingThe FAQ as Vital OSPO Tool
Using a community FAQ as a way to get internal disagreement addressed and external communities on board – the OpenJDK experience!
In this talk from FOSS Backstage 2021, Rich Sands and I discuss the way we used a (very large) FAQ to both align the disparate corporate functions inside Sun Microsystems and address the lack of trust in Sun by both the Free Java community and the wider open source community. What we did back then is still a highly appropriate tool for any OSPO that needs to stand in the divide between a controversial corporate position and an aggravated community.
Oracle Finally Killed Sun
With the Solaris team gutted, it looks like the Sun skeleton has finally been picked clean.
The news from the ex-Sun community jungle drums is that the January rumours were true and Oracle laid off the core talent of the Solaris and SPARC teams on Friday (perhaps hoping to get the news lost in the Labor Day weekend). With 90% gone according to Bryan Cantrill that surely has to mean either a skeleton-staffed maintenance-only future for the product range, especially with Solaris 12 cancelled, or an attempt to force Solaris workloads onto Oracle’s SPARC Cloud offering. A classic Oracle “silent EOL”, no matter what they claim as they satisfy their contractual commitments to Fujitsu and others.
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