On many occassions I have sat in with programmers that reviewed code without contributing. Peer review is part of a good process. You can't rely on that as a basis to attack OpenSolaris or open Java.

"An IBM executive comments on Sun’s OpenSolaris as a weak attempt at open source: "It's a facade. There's lots of marketing, but no community to speak of." Ouch.

Hmmmm. Last time I checked, IBM and Sun were competitors.

Remember, competition? Its one of those forces found in markets. Or perhaps this site has become so involved in pushing the large corporate monopoly, they've forgotten about competitive forces???

So why should I be surprised that two business competitors are both trying to show that they are better open source citizens than the other?

It's that competion for the moral high ground that is helping to drive corporations to support open source in the first place.

This is great news for open source.

Also, MikeT had a great point--more than developers participate. For example, I have found a bug in the 64 bit driver for a hard disk controller. Somebody else fixed it. Which is more than MS has done for all the drivers that still do not work on my 64 bit computer. But no matter I am about three months into only Linux on my home computer--ditched Windows completely.

***It's that competion for the moral high ground that is helping to drive corporations to support open source in the first place.***

I was defending Sun in that post. IBM was doing a bit of marketing by painting Sun in a bad light; to marginalize it within the open source community. What IBM is competing for isn't to sell more services or hardware/software products, but to drive volunteer open source programmers away from Sun.

You probably should have been more specific then because enigma_factory and I both came to the same conclusion that you apparently didn't realize that peer review is an important part of major software projects. Even in "the real world," it is considered important to have reviews by people who haven't really seen the code before because they aren't as biased by working with it.

I think your analysis of IBM is not entirely accurate, though. They are trying to drive developers away from **Solaris**, not Sun. Every developer working on OpenSolaris is one that could be working on Linux in their opinion. AFAIK, not all of OpenSolaris is even open source yet, so they do have a valid concern from their perspective.

OK, by "observing" I meant "reading about" or "hearing about." "Observing" code as peer review would actually be part of the open source process- you're right.

Thanks for pointing out IBM's specific concern with Solaris: "Every developer working on OpenSolaris is one that could be working on Linux in their opinion."