Sun has indeed donated more code to the GPL than most any other on the planet, most famously Java. I don’t consider it fair to state “they had no choice” and also “they should be judged on their actions, not their words”. While they are certainly acting in their own best interest (as they should), both their actions and words have been rather pro-FLOSS for quite some time.

I’m not ready to pick out curtains or anything, and have always felt that Sun would much rather be Microsoft than Sun, but Sun is donating while Microsoft is threatening and undermining - so give me Sun over MS any day.

i would certainly rather deal with Sun than MS. i’m undecided about IBM, as they are hard to judge: backing OSS, but hideously bureaucratic and hierarchical organization with vestiges of the most conservative proprietary culture on the other hand.

I can’t stand Sun’s PAM implementation. And can’t find much in the OS that I’d prefer to how it’s done in Linux, not to speak of the (not necessarily related) applications/tools that are bundled with it; awk, sed and grep as shipped with Solaris are very feature-poor compared to the GNU counterparts.

I do, however, like dtrace.

Excuse me, but HOW SO? Where is the demonstration? What behavior has demonstrated “genuine commitment”? I ask only so the unwashed and clearly out of touch among us can know. I also want to point out that commitment means NOTHING. It implies nothing. Actual behavior is meaningful.

Also, what do you think you mean, what do any of us mean, when we use terms like, “genuine”, or “sincere”, or “good”.

Mr. Schwartz’s job is to create and maximize, at the edges, at the margin, and wherever else possible, the profit and revenue of Sun, period - that is how his performance is judged, that is how his salary is set, etc. It also makes it reasonably simple to intuit and understand his behavior, which in turn has the added benefit of allowing one to better understand the entity that is Sun - i.e. profit seeking is a context that leads to well understood behavior, hopefully rational, even if strange, obfuscated, and murky at times.

And that is all well and good, go Amerika! and all that.

But my question to you reader is, are you under the impression, living in a world inside your head of “magical” thinking and childish wish fulfillment, that this is some kind of love-in and “Jonathon” is some kind of hippy dippy ponytail wearing high priest of all that is good and wonderful about OSS and Linux?

I would also suggest that if you, as in whomever is reading this, are not on a personal first name basis with Mr. Schwartz, to use the man’s last name as a show of respect and more importantly, as a buffer for objective analysis: he is not a pop-culture Disney icon who has invited the world to endear themselves to him, and he to they, through the folk usage of his first name.

My almost last question: Why must we give Mr. Schwartz the benefit of the doubt for the moment? He has had it for a long time. His response to the post by Linus Torvalds, as indicated by many posters at this point, is somewhat disingenuous and avoids seriously responding to the charges on the table. Just go read the post by the team lead of SSH for an explanation of what I am alluding to here.

So, let us see what Mr. Schwartz, and the company called SUN, that HE RUNS, and for whose PROFITS he is held RESPONSIBLE, does.

Final Jeopardy Question: When a Linux/OSS/Free Software person uses the word “good” when describing or discussing behavior or choices related to software development, the industry, OSS, Linux, etc, do you think it has the same meaning Mr. Schwartz ascribes to it when used as a modifier like, “good profits”, or, “good behavior that will lead to good profits”?