Is Sun really in favor of open source?

Filed in archive Business on December 12, 2007

Sun is facing criticism not from its competitors but its own former employees!! If we believe the words of this former Sun engineer then the company resorted to strong arm tactics to snatch control of Open DS which is an open source project putting a question mark on the functioning of the company but Sun said that it was not resorting to any such tactics.




Neil Wilson, a former engineer at Sun has some other story to tell. As per Neil, he and a few other colleagues were threatened to hand over control of Open DS to Sun and in the process they ended up losing up their jobs in September 2007. Even though they were out of job he along with his colleagues decided to remain associated with the project but fighting against Sun could never be easy for them and ultimately they had to end their association with the project since Sun threatened to terminate their jobs and withdraw all severance benefits if they did not comply with their wishes. Though Neil is not sure of their intentions but hopes that Sun is honest about its plans for open source in real terms.

Is Neil uttering the truth? He could be probably since Sun had been for a long time shying away from the idea of open sourcing Java and what all communities it had been associated with such as Open JDK or Java/JCP had been done for the benefit of shareholders of Sun and not the open source communities. Is Sun trying to play open source game to color up its intentions? It seems the truth might never surface.