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Should free development be a part of free software, or is Apache pioneer Roy Fielding asking too much of Sun? Besides looking at the commercial side of free software, this month's column investigates synchronization of speech and text.
Is open source an ideology or a business model [1]? Roy T. Fielding again raised this question in his February blog announcement that he would be quitting the OpenSolaris project. The co-creator of the world's most widespread web server, Apache [2], is turning his back on the Sun project and the discussions surrounding it [3].
Ideals, Religion, and Business
Roy Fielding accuses Sun of enticing him with the promise that development of OpenSolaris, which was placed under a free license in June 2005, also would be free. In fact, Sun can prescribe the path taken by the distribution because it owns the OpenSolaris brand, and can thus dictate the content of the releases.Fielding points out that he is not an ideologist who is looking to free the whole software community – and with it many other areas – of economic constraints. "Open Source is a business decision, not a religion," he writes in his blog.
Consequently, Fielding must answer questions concerning the motivation for voluntary work on a free software project if it is simply an efficient business model. Self-serving behavior by Sun and other companies shows that expectations of altruism from commercial software developers are unrealistic.
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