it-director.com — In July 2005 news first emerged of Sun Microsystems' first foray into open source identity management with the Open Web Single Sign-On (OpenSSO) project. Now, a year later, the project has been formally launched. Sun has kept to its word with OpenSSO and is releasing source code for the significant chunks of its Java System Access Manager.
Sep 6, 2006 View in Crawl 4
xalorousSep 7, 2006
This looks like a flaw in the open source movement. I think it is admirable that Sun is supporting open source. But wouldn't their time be better spent adopting and supporting one of the existing projects, rather than starting their own? OpenLDAP and OpenSSO for instance, are not (that I know of) associated with any major Sun competitors. Why support these projects, or locate and support better ones?It seems to me that all these projects are duplicating effort. Perhaps they should get together and form standards, then each project can implement the standard as they wish, and we can choose the best.
zetaetaSep 7, 2006
These projects from Sun all appear to be steps toward a final goal of making Java properly Open Source. Because Java is a whole pile of proprietary parts, by building an Open Source project on top of each part as they get permission to open it up, Sun popularizes that section of code.I suspect that Sun is thinking to retain the communities they grow from their own projects, rather than be just one part of a standards design group, so that Sun is directly associated with good PR in the minds of Open Source workers and advocates. However, you're probably right that building standards for everyone to work toward is the better way.
superpatSep 7, 2006
Two reasons for the chunkiness of opensourcing OpenSSO. (1) Generally, you can't just take a body of source code and throw it over the wall. It needs some review - mainly to ensure that we own every line. So, to get some useful stuff out quickly, we work on the core first, open source that, then move on to the peripheral stuff. So, some more chunks will appear as open source, real soon now. (2) As confirmed by the review, some code is licensed from third parties. Although we're allowed to compile it into a closed source product for binary distribution, we're not allowed to re-distribute the source. So some chunks will never appear as open source, simply because the source doesn't belong to Sun.
Closed AccountSep 7, 2006
<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/tech_news/Technology_Addiction_Say_What">http://digg.com/tech_news/Technology_Addiction_Say_What</a>
crpietschmannSep 7, 2006
Releasing only parts of the source is called Shared Source, not Open Source. Huge difference.
crpietschmannSep 7, 2006
<a class="user" href="http://www.sun.com/software/products/identity/opensso/">http://www.sun.com/software/products/identity/opensso/</a>