Great Business Strategy or Dumb Luck Interesting read here today at ZDNet -- Open Solaris and strategic consequences. Here's a bit of the conclusion:

Open Solaris may go down in history as one the finest examples of business strategy ever -- unless, of course, it's just dumb luck.

So, we are so brilliant -- to the extreme -- that when OpenSolaris succeeds it will be characterized as "one of the finest examples of business strategy ever." Ever? That would be quite an achievement. But even if we are successful -- shifting to the extreme polar opposite now -- we could just as easily be considered "dumb" and that our achievement was "just lucky." What? Why the extremes? Sorry. I just can't factory that. I realize I'm a pretty simple guy, but this makes no sense to me. Why do people look at issues this way? I think this is why some conversations are so confusing. People argue to the extremes. Why can't Sun's open sourcing of Solaris be seen as simply the natural evolution of a company, a development team, a product, and a market? Or the genuine attempt of the Solaris kernel engineers to engage with external developers in a community co-development model to improve the system for everyone involved? Why can't it be that simple? What am I missing here?
Jim makes a great point!
Also note that Open Source Solaris is a huge contribution to the Open Source communityfrom a company (that IMHO) has actually been one of the largest Open Source contributors in history period. We just don't track history very well these days thanks to the kind of zealotry written about here(*strong language*), and here(in this case byRory Blythe).
BTW - Here are some of my previous posts on the subject of Open Source.