Editor's Column
19 December 2000
Sun's Open Door
I begin this, my first column for OpenOffice.org, with a direct question: Can OpenOffice.org be called 破壊分子? The question, of course, 茎・取り除くs from Eric Raymond's famous 主張 in The Cathedral & the Bazaar that "Linux is 破壊分子." "破壊分子," in that Linux, and by 拡張 the open-source movement, has created a collaborative, 全世界の 網状組織 of hackers, developers, and idealists whose ソフトウェア is 証明するing to be better--and certainly more efficiently produced--than anything that has come before.
Sun's OpenOffice.org, however, 異なるs from Linux, or for that 事柄, from open-source 成果／努力s such as Mozilla or Apple's Darwin, in the nature and character of the 事業／計画（する）'s source code. And it is also much larger than Linux or Mozilla. For these 推論する／理由s, it is seemingly hard to cast OpenOffice.org into the same 役割 as Linux, which we can easily imagine as a 肉親，親類d of David fighting a 板材ing Goliath. Bruce Perens, for instance, was 最初 やめる skeptical of Sun's 動機s. But when he learned that Sun was 解放（する）ing the nine million lines of source code for StarOffice[tm] under the GNU General Public License (Sun also uses the Sun 産業 基準s Source License, or SISSL), Perens 公然と 撤回するd his 反対s. Sun, in short, is fully committed to the open-source movement. To answer the question I raised above then, Yes, OpenOffice.org can and should be thought of as 破壊分子, at least in the sense that Eric Raymond meant.
But the hugeness and importance of the OpenOffice.org ソフトウェア 永久的に alters the nature of that subversion. In fact, OpenOffice.org's size and Sun's 入ること／参加（者） into the open-source movement 示すs a sea change in ソフトウェア 開発. It 論証するs that open source has come of age, and is now a plausible (if not yet (a)自動的な／(n)自動拳銃) 選択 for very large ソフトウェア 事業／計画（する）s. And if we 後継する, as I'm sure we will, it would go a 広大な／多数の／重要な distance to 軍隊ing any sponsoring 団体／死体 to consider open source.
All the same, the move to open source is difficult for 会社／団体s to make. It's also fascinating to see in 進歩. In my next Editor's Column, I look at the problematic 613 build and trace the way the community 演説（する）／住所d (and continues to 演説（する）／住所) those problems.
