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.

Sun may not be putting forth its strongest efforts in attracting or interacting with open source developer communities for good reason. As a Sun executive notes, for the most part, it is only a few developers who participate in open source development.

Take the Linux kernel. Precious few people contribute anything to the Linux kernel, but that doesn't mean that it's not important for it to be open source; it just means that there are not many people whose calling is to be a Linux kernel committer.

I don't know how many people will make up the open-source Java SE community, but it's unlikely to be more than a few hundred. The number of people who will be interested will be vast, but the number actually cutting code will be quite small.

Sounds like open source's "many eyeballs" are observing rather than programming or developing...