The Open Group's New Open Source Strategy

Bruce Perens writes "The Open Group hasn't always had the best reputation in the Open Source community, mostly because of their handling of Motif, which remained proprietary for much too long. But there's no arguing with the success of our community, and now the Open Group leadership understands that their organization must be fully involved in Open Source... or it's time for them to change their name. To that end, the Open Group contracted me to develop an Open Source strategy for their organization. The draft strategy has been published and they are requesting comment. - Bruce"

Re:Motif?

[TheViffer]

Motif Faq [faqs.org]

Subject: 2)* Is the Motif source code publically available?
[Last modified: Jan 02]

Answer: On May 15, 2000 the Open Group released the Motif source code for
Motif 2.1, using a public license, to the Open Source community. On January
29, 2002, Open Motif 2.2 was released.

Re:Motif?

[zephc]

According to the Motif FAQ, "On May 15, 2000 the Open Group released the Motif source code for Motif 2.1, using a public license, to the Open Source community. On January 29, 2002, Open Motif 2.2 was released.

For more information on Open Motif, see:

http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/ [opengroup.org]"

Re:Motif?

[Ed Avis]

Yes - it's available under a semi-free licence that lets you distribute it alongside Linux, but it's still not free software. So Lesstif is not obsolete quite yet.

Re:My attention span is about 5 minutes

[Mr_Silver]

what is PHB?

Pointy Haired Boss - as found in Dilbert [dilbert.com].

Generally used to indicate the archetypal half-witted middle-management type.

Re:Emacs people:

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is an old-timey way of denoting a Boolean check. I'm not an Emacs person nor a Lisp person but I heard that somewhere.

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[Quill_28]

You need to re-read the GPL manifesto. You are under the assumption that the GPL is around to help people.

mk (as in mkLinux)

[crow]

Yes, OSF (later The Open Group after they merged with X/Open) created OSF/1, which was originally going to be the Unix for all the member companies. I think that included DEC, HP, and IBM, but not Sun. In the end, only DEC moved away from using their own home-grown system, so it could be considered a failure based on the original goals.

Later, The Open Group developed mk, based on the Mach 3 microkernel. While the Unix personality for the kernel was tainted with AT&T code, the microkernel was able to be released for free. The free mk was released with a Linux-based server, with the package known as mkLinux. Some (most?) of the funding for mk came from Apple, and I believe that it is the basis for OS X.

There was a little-known project called mk++, which was a complete re-write of the Mach microkernel interfaces using C++. There was a plan to release a book on mk++ along with a CD containing mk++Linux. Unfortunately, a month or so before it was to be sent off, all development efforts were shut down, and The Open Group became a Unix branding organization.

NOTE: I worked briefly at The Open Group, doing work on mk and mk++.

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[Bruce Perens]

According to European and US economic data, a minority of software jobs are connected with retail software. Most software is not written to be sold. Instead, software is a cost-center within a company that does something else for its profit-center. Internal software is often a non-differentiating (doesn't make your company different from the competition) but necessary. This is all perfect for Open Source collaboration.

So, to the question "will Open Source kill my job?", the answer is generally "no". India will kill your job (well, those of you who are not in India). And I don't know what you should do about that.

Bruce

Re:Draft strategy is excellent summary of Open Sou

[Bruce Perens]

Nice to hear from you, Thad.

No, this is a get them going document. Once their membership gets more deeply into Open Source, they should be able to determine their own direction - although I will be around if they need help.

Regarding the "Sorry vendors", there are a few more inflamatory lines in there to keep people awake. The one about having to change their name, and I pretty much blast strategic marketing in tech companies.

Bruce

Re:Too complex/too little time?

[Bruce Perens]

There's a mailing list associated with the draft.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Open Source = Free?

[Bruce Perens]

There are proprietary forms of software with disclosed source code but without Open Source licensing. Microsoft calls this Shared Source, Sun calls it Community Source, I just call it "Disclosed Source-Code". It's important to note that Open Source relates to the rights attached to the code, not just the presence of source code.

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members? No.

[Bruce Perens]

Hi Andy,

Did I really say it was HP's 40% profit margin?

The Open Group is a mixed vendor-and-customer organization, and one that I can't see is dominated by the vendors.

I think you need to remember that vendors exist to serve customers. If they don't do that as well as possible, they should fail and go out of business. That is what capitalism is about.

Bruce

Re:The OpenGroup is the Cathedral and irrelevant

[kflowers]

I was on the Motif team at OSF (I can't bring myself to call it The Open Group). I agree OSF was the Cathedral. I bet you are also right that KDE and Gnome are better than Motif in a shorter amount of time. Be careful though about how you attribute this. And also be careful about the value of this distinction.

Both Gnome and KDE were able to leverage the design work that went into Motif and the other widget sets that came before them. Motif was better than Athena for the same reason. Most of the hard work goes into the design.

As for the value - When Motif was around and strong, it was clear to Unix developers what widget set and style to use. Working in industry now, I never hear about Gnome or KDE. They may be better, but they are irrelevant to my company.

Re:*Yawn*

[Bruce Perens]

It's not Open Group holding this up. It's one of the copyright holders, a big tech company.

Bruce

Re:mk (as in mkLinux)

[dukerobillard]

I think that included DEC, HP, and IBM, but not Sun.

Indeed...OSF was founded in response to Sun and AT&T getting together to work on System V Release 4. This scared the other UNIX vendors, and they wanted to make sure they had a UNIX to sell, too. The joke was the "OSF" stood for "Oppose Sun Forever."

Fujitsu, Bull, and Siemens were the other major original members. There were lots of other companies that were sort of "associate" members.