It appears that there are some questions about the content in the open letter that I posted earlier this week. Simon Phipps (Sun’s chief open source officer) posted a comment on my blog that summarizes these questions, so I will use this post to reply to it. The original text from Simon’s post will be indented and italicized, and my responses will be in plain text.

Hi Neil,

Despite the fact you didn’t actually contact the Sun ombudsman service[1], I have had several referrals of your postings. I’ve done a little investigation and I have some questions about your story.

Actually, I did contact the Sun ombudsman service. The exact same text that was included in my blog post was also sent as an e-mail message. That message was sent from neil.a.wilson[at]directorymanager.org with a timestamp of “Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:57:03 -0600” (9:57 AM US Central Time), and was addressed to neil.a.wilson[at]directorymanager.org. It was blind copied to the following recipients:

• users[at]opends.dev.java.net
• dev[at]opends.dev.java.net
• jis[at]sun.com
• ombudsman[at]sun.com

I did not receive any bounce messages in reply, and my mail server logs confirm that Sun’s mail server did in fact accept the message for delivery. If my message never made it into the ombudsman[at]sun.com inbox, then perhaps the problem is on your end (e.g., over-eager spam filtering, which happened to me on more than one occasion when I was a Sun employee).

It’s very regrettable that you were laid off, no question. That’s not a part of your narrative I can comment on for HR/legal reasons, but it’s always sad when business pressures force layoffs.

Thank you for the sentiment. While I wasn’t particularly happy about being laid off, I don’t hold a grudge against Sun because of it. Regardless of whether I think it was an intelligent move, Sun did have a justification for it (geographic consolidation). If the only thing that had happened was that I got laid off, then I fully expect that I would still be actively participating in the project. I believe I demonstrated that through my continued involvement in the project even after having received my layoff notification.

However, I do question how you characterize the requests to change the OpenDS governance. I note that the OpenDS governance was changed on April 28 by sshoaff[2] and that the original line reading:

“This Project Lead, who is appointed by Sun Microsystems, is responsible for managing the entire project”

was replaced by one reading

“This Project Lead, who is appointed and removed by a majority vote of the Project Owners, is responsible for managing the entire project”

I have not been able to find a discussion of this change anywhere, and I understand from your former managers that they were unaware of this change. While you characterize the request made of you as:

“demanded that the owners approve a governance change that would grant Sun full control of the OpenDS project”

it seems to me that what in fact happened was you were (collectively) asked to revert that change to its original state. On present data, it appears to me that far from Sun acting in bad faith over the governance, they were in fact making a reasonable request to correct an earlier error. Indeed, all that has happened to the governance document since then is to revert the change[3].

This is not the whole story.

First, the change to which you refer (committed in revision 1739 by Stephen Shoaff on April 28, 2007) was absolutely not unauthorized. Stephen Shoaff and Don Bowen both served as officers of the company (Stephen as the director of engineering for directory products, and Don as a director of product marketing for all identity products), and David Ely was the engineering manager and the Sun-appointed project lead for OpenDS under the original governance. This change was also discussed with Sun’s open source office, and while you (Simon) may not have been directly involved with those discussions, Don Bowen has informed me that there was a telephone conversation in which you told him that each project should make the decisions that are best for its respective community. We also involved the OpenDS and Identity Management communities in the process, although those conversations were on a personal basis with key members rather than at large on the public mailing lists. Unfortunately, none of us can currently produce any evidence to support these claims. When we received the layoff notification we were required to return or destroy any Sun property that we may have had, and since all of these discussions would be considered Sun-internal communication we no longer have access to any record of them in compliance with the notification requirement. However, full documentation to support all of these claims should exist within Sun should you feel the need to verify them.

Second, this was not the governance change to which I referred in my original post. In the meeting that the owners (including Ludovic) had on November 13, 2007, we were informed that it was Sun’s intention to replace the governance with something different and that the new governance would be chosen and managed by a Sun-selected committee. This change has not yet been applied, and as I am no longer involved with the project I cannot comment on whether there is still intent to make it. However, Eduardo referenced this future change on the OpenDS user mailing list today (https://opends.dev.java.net/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgNo=627) when he said “We want to improve these governances, ideally in a consistent way.”

There was no discussion at all during the November 13 meeting of the change made in revision 1739, and it was not brought to our attention until the following evening. To the best of my knowledge the request to revert the change made in revision 1739 was never discussed with anyone other than Stephen Shoaff. I know that I personally never received any communication from anyone within Sun asking me to approve reverting this change.

Finally, I would ask Sun to justify their subsequent reversion of that change and how they believe that it was in the best interests of OpenDS, or how doing so was consistent with Sun’s public stance on the importance and value of community-led projects. Despite the fact that the change we made had more than sufficient authorization, I fail to see how reverting it is in any way an improvement. How is reverting to a Sun-appointed absolute authority better for the community than the consensus-driven model we thought Sun wanted?

I would be happy to continue to investigate this case, so if you would like to submit a complaint to ombudsman@sun.com with full data supporting your accusations I would be pleased to investigate further. I’m afraid I don’t usually read your blog so you’ll need to alert me (webmink@sun.com) to any postings here that need my attention.

Regards

Simon

[1] http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/open_source_ombudsman
[2] http://tinyurl.com/ys5hf3
[3] http://tinyurl.com/yto9qs

I am afraid that there may not be any benefit to further investigation. It appears that you are using your position to attack my credibility and focus on damage control for Sun rather than acting impartially on my behalf as per your claim at http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/open_source_ombudsman. Even if for some reason you did not receive the message that I originally sent to ombudsman[at]sun.com, I find it very discouraging and disappointing that Sun’s community advocate would choose to respond in such an inflammatory manner via e-mail messages and blog comments without even making an attempt to contact me for further clarification. You have accused me of launching an attack with partial facts but apparently have made no attempt to contact me to get the complete facts for yourself. I had gone out of my way to indicate that I felt that this was an isolated incident and not in-line with Sun’s true stance on open source, but it’s hard to continue to hold that position when Sun’s ombudsman and chief open source officer behaves in such a manner.

My name is Neil Wilson, and until recently I held the Owner and Committer roles in the open source OpenDS project. I helped found OpenDS, served as the project architect, and have contributed more code than anyone else. However, I must now regrettably inform you that I have been compelled to end all involvement with OpenDS. I have resigned all roles that I held in the project and have rescinded my Sun Contributor Agreement. I will no longer contribute code, documentation, bug reports, suggestions for improvement, or advice of any kind.

I joined Sun Microsystems in October of 2001, where I was directly involved with its proprietary directory products in addition to my later work with OpenDS. I wrote and analyzed code to provide new features, fix bugs, and improve performance, and I developed a number of tools to help improve the Directory Server experience. I had excellent working relationships with a number of customers, and I was instrumental in closing several deals worth many millions of dollars. I consistently received the top rating in annual performance reviews, and I worked with a number of other groups within Sun, as well as with Sun partners, to help ensure that the Directory Server products worked as well as possible with other Sun technologies, including Solaris, Java, and a number of other software products, as well as many different kinds of hardware.

On September 27, 2007, I was notified that Directory Server engineering, including OpenDS, was being consolidated in Grenoble, France, and that US-based positions were being eliminated. Some individuals were reassigned to work on other software products, but among those laid off were the four OpenDS project owners (myself, Stephen Shoaff, Don Bowen, and David Ely), as well as the OpenDS community manager (Trey Drake). We would technically remain Sun employees for the next two months, but were not able to access any Sun-internal resources and were not required to work in any way and were encouraged to use that time to seek employment elsewhere.

This was certainly a very surprising move, but the shock wore off and within a few days the OpenDS owners and community manager got together and decided that even if we were no longer working for Sun that we would like to continue our involvement with OpenDS and wished to ensure that the project was in the best possible position moving forward. To that end, we had face-to-face meetings, conference calls, and e-mail discussions with Sun employees still involved in the project to provide advice and knowledge transfers. I also continued participation on the project mailing lists, committed code changes, and updated the project issue tracker and documentation wiki.

The project owners also decided that as an act of good faith (and without any prompting from Sun) that we should elect a fifth owner who was a Sun employee, since Sun had certainly made a significant contribution to the project. We appointed Ludovic Poitou to this position, as he had served as the architect for Sun’s proprietary Directory Server product for several years, and further suggested that we should amend the project governance to ensure that Sun Microsystems was granted a permanent seat in the project ownership. On November 13, 2007, the OpenDS project owners (including Ludovic) met via conference call with the intention of discussing this governance change. However, during that meeting Ludovic informed us that Sun’s intention was to change the OpenDS governance policy so that the project was controlled entirely by a Sun-selected committee. This was a surprise to us, and we indicated that while we were willing to discuss this further to better understand what was involved, we were concerned that this was not necessarily in the best interests of the OpenDS project or its associated open source community. We noted that the current OpenDS governance policy stated that governance changes could only be made by a consensus of the project owners, and therefore we would be required to approve any potential change.

On November 14, 2007, a member of executive management within Sun’s software division contacted one of the recently-laid-off OpenDS project owners and demanded that the owners approve a governance change that would grant Sun full control of the OpenDS project. During this call, we were threatened that if we did not make this change we could face immediate termination and loss of all severance benefits. The four former-Sun owners discussed this and decided that we could not in good conscience approve the requested change as we did not believe that it would be in the best interests of the project, but we were also not willing to risk the considerable financial loss that could result if Sun decided to make good on that threat. After first trying to resolve the issue through more amicable avenues, we were ultimately compelled to resign our ownership and end our association with the project on November 19, 2007.

This was a very disappointing and hurtful turn of events. I believe that we acted only in good faith and in the best interests of the community, and we had clearly taken action to protect Sun’s position in the project even after our own jobs had been eliminated. OpenDS was founded as a community-focused “doacracy”, and no one has done more than I have to help ensure its success, or to ensure Sun’s success through OpenDS. However, Sun management has shown that at least in this case they are willing to resort to rather hostile tactics to preserve absolute control. This is most certainly not in the spirit of open source and open development that we tried to foster or that Sun claims to embody.

Please note that I don’t feel that this action was representative of Sun’s true open source strategy, but was a relatively isolated incident brought on by middle management acting of their own accord. I believe and certainly hope that the public statements made by individuals like CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps are honest and that Sun truly does want to be a genuine community-focused open source company, and I have no reason to believe that they were aware of or involved with any of what happened with OpenDS. Similarly, I sympathize with the remaining Sun-employed OpenDS engineers who may have been unwittingly drawn into this turmoil, and am disappointed that we will no longer be able to work together, but it was not my choice. Unfortunately, if Sun is unable to ensure that their middle management is on the same page as the senior management setting the open source strategy and the engineers making it happen, then it won’t take too many more incidents like this (or the Project Indiana / OpenSolaris Developer Preview naming fiasco) for people to start to question Sun’s true intentions.

In order to avoid potential retaliation from Sun, I have remained silent on this matter through the duration of the two-month period following the layoff notification during which I was still technically a Sun employee. Now that this time has elapsed, I am no longer at risk of losing severance benefits and I believe that it is important to clear the air. I have no desire to pursue this matter any further through legal or other channels, but simply wish to explain why I am no longer able to be involved with the OpenDS project.

I am passionate about the technology and hope to continue working in this area in the future, but I am not yet prepared to discuss where I’m going from here. You may watch my new blog at / for more information in the future.

Neil Wilson
neil.a.wilson[at]directorymanager.org