Clarifications on the Open Letter

/ Neil Wilson / 10 Comments

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.

An Open Letter to the OpenDS Community and to Sun Microsystems

/ Neil Wilson / 10 Comments

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

The Mist

/ Neil Wilson

Tonight, I finally got a chance to see Stephen King’s “The Mist”, which also happened to be the 100th unique first-run movie that I’ve seen in the theater so far this year. I don’t think that there’s any possible way that I can adequately review the movie without any spoilers, so if you’re planning on seeing it for yourself and don’t want to know what happens, then don’t read beyond this paragraph. I’m going to give it an 8 out of 10, and it was much better than I expected it to be, so if you liked what you saw based on the trailers and were thinking about seeing it, then I would recommend that you go.

If you’re still reading, this, then I assume that you’re in one of the following categories:

  • You’re going to see the movie but want to know how it ends anyway.
  • You know you’re not going to see it but would like to know how it ends.
  • You’re still undecided and want help figuring out whether this movie is for you.

If you’re in the third category and are on the bubble about whether to see it, then let me repeat that it’s a very good movie, but I will warn you that it has a very rough ending. In my opinion, it was just about the perfect way to end the movie, but it is definitely not for the feint of heart. And this is your last chance to stop reading before I start giving away details.

The movie opens with a big storm. It’s bad enough that it blows a tree over into David Drayton’s house and smashes out his window. The damage is pretty widespread and knocks out the power pretty much all over town. When morning comes, the storm has ended but there is a heavy mist moving down the mountains and across the lake toward the town. David and his son Billy go into town to stop by the grocery store and then stop by the hardware store to pick up supplies to fix the window. Apparently everyone else in town had the same idea because when they get to the grocery store it’s packed, and the fact they they don’t have any power (save for an emergency generator that’s just enough to keep the freezers running), so the lines aren’t moving all that quickly. Then the mist reaches the store, and a man comes running in with blood on his face screaming about there being something in the mist. Of course, no one believes him at first, but it doesn’t that long before they find out otherwise. The first victim comes when a bag boy is preparing to step outside to check on the flue for the emergency generator but gets dragged away by a set of clawed tentacles as soon as they open the door at the loading dock. But since that happened in the loading dock, only a few people saw it and many others in the store were still skeptical. That came to an end when a second set of people walked out the front door and were snatched away in front of their eyes. At that point, it was clear that their best bet was to ride things out in the store. They had plenty of food and supplies, so hopefully they would be able to last until help arrived. They barricaded themselves into the store and tried to tape up the big plate glass windows at the front of the store before stacking up bags of dog food behind them. One woman had a gun in her purse, and others got knives and sharpened sticks, and they prepared several mops to use as torches if necessary.

As night began to fall, things started to get worse. Huge insect-like creatures (about two feet long and one foot wide, with nice long stingers) began to gather on the store’s front windows, but they didn’t really become a threat until another type of creature which can only be described as a pterodactyl arrived and started flying into one of the windows. After a couple of hits, the window started to break, and soon there was a hole big enough for a couple of the pterodactyls and several of the insects to come inside. The people fought them off to the best of their abilities, and were ultimately successful in repelling the attack, but not without casualties. One woman was stung by one of the insects and died pretty quickly thereafter, and one man showed a complete lack of skill at wielding one of the mop-torches and caught himself on fire along with part of the store. They were able to get the fire out fairly quickly so that no real damage was done to the store, but the man was badly burned. And to top it off, a religious nut (Mrs. Carmody, played by Marcia Gay Harden) who had been spouting off in true cult-leader fashion started to amass an ever-growing group of followers.

The man who had been burned was in very bad shape. He was in a lot of pain, and was in great danger of having his wounds become infected. Unfortunately, this supermarket wasn’t one that included a pharmacy, but there was one next door, and a few of them made the decision that they needed to try to get to it to try to save him. When dawn came, they set out cautiously and made it into the pharmacy without incident. However, getting back was a different matter altogether. Only as they were trying to leave did they notice the Alien-esque people suspended from the ceiling in what looked to be spider webs, and then they encountered the “spiders” that made them, only this time the webs that they shot out were like some kind of incredibly potent acid that would quickly burn through anything they landed on. When they finally were able to return to the supermarket, only about half of the party had survived, and even then it was all for naught as it was too late to save the burn victim.

By this time, Mrs. Carmody had won over most of the people in the store with her very selective interpretations of Bible passages, until there were only about ten people left who weren’t blindly following her. She had already begun to mention that they might need to sacrifice one of the heathens to appease God, and it all came to a head when she demanded that David’s son Billy be that sacrifice. Her followers began to comply and started trying to grab him away, and the only thing that stopped them was when one of the remaining clear-headed men took the gun and shot her dead. They then thought it was best to try to get away from there and see if they could drive far enough south to escape the mist and the creatures contained in it. They headed for David’s Land Rover, and the fact that there were ten of them and only room for eight wasn’t all that big a problem because their numbers were down to five by the time they made it to the vehicle. They drove off leaving the now leaderless cult members in shock and started to head south. They dove for quite some time past all kinds of carnage, but they reached the end of their gas tank before finding the edge of the mist. As the Land Rover sputtered to a stop, they could still hear the creatures and they began to accept their fate. They still had the gun with them and decided that it would be a far better way to go than at the mercy of the monsters, but alas there were five of them and only four bullets. After shooting his own son and the three other passengers, David stepped out of the vehicle and began screaming for the creatures to come take him away, only to be met with a much more horrifying sight: out of the mist came an army brigade replete with tanks and soldiers, and carrying truckloads of survivors to safety.

This was an appalling ending, but it was the right one for the movie, and it was the one that I was secretly hoping for once it became clear that they were considering death by gunshot. It would not have been nearly as good for them to have all been saved at the last minute, nor for David to have been killed by one of the creatures, or for them to have been able to drive to safety. My only slight disappointment with the ending was that none of the survivors being rescued by the army were from the supermarket. I think that small touch would have been just the right amount of additional salt into David’s wounds to complete one of the most tragic conclusions of any movie I have ever seen.

My only other minor complaint was that I thought that their explanation for the origin of the creatures was weak. Over the course of the movie, we learned that the nearby mountains housed a military base and that some army scientists had been exploring the possibility of alternate dimensions when the accidentally opened a door to one of those other dimensions and some of the creatures inhabiting it were able to cross over into our world. This was such a far-fetched explanation that I found it to be disappointing. Of course, given the subject of the movie any reason that they had provided would likely have been implausible, but I think that it would have been far better to keep the origin of the creatures a mystery than to offer up such a lame explanation.

Despite my mild disappointment over a couple of small aspects of the movie, I was nevertheless very pleased with the way that it turned out. I was glad to see the right ending even if it may be an unpopular one.

Movies for the Weekend of 11/23/2007

/ Neil Wilson

This weekend, I saw three movies, all of them at the Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek.

RoboCop (7/10)

The first was the mid-80s classic RoboCop, showing as the midnight movie this weekend. It had been quite a while since I had last seen it, and it was the first time I had seen it in a theater, but it’s a good movie and was well worth it. I don’t think that it’s ever revealed exactly when the movie was supposed to be set, but its depiction of the “future” isn’t as laughable as many other movies of the same type. Many of the special effects look pretty lame by today’s standards, but interestingly enough the IMDB trivia page indicates that they were done on a Commodore Amiga.

Hitman (5/10)

The first new release that I saw this weekend was Hitman. It is based on a video game of the same name (and there’s a scene in the movie where you can see a couple of kids playing it in the background). I’m not really very familiar with the game, and I’ve never played it, so I can’t say how faithfully the movie followed the game, but judging the movie as a standalone entity I thought that it was decent at best.

There was enough action in the movie to keep it interesting, but there was nothing at all original about the story and as such any attempted plot twists really weren’t much of a surprise. It seemed rather un-covert to have their highly-trained secret assassins shaved bald with a big bar code tattooed on the back of their heads, but apparently everyone else is so stupid that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t seem to make them any easier to spot when they’re making their way through a train station, and it doesn’t raise too much of a red flag when an arms dealer’s bodyguards let him alone into a bathroom with their client with little more than a pat-down. Also, the little glass beads scattered on the floor outside of a hotel room that crunch loudly when you step on them are apparently ignored by both special forces operatives and the housekeeping staff. Perhaps the filmmakers thought that throwing in some unnecessary nudity would make up for it, but I think that they misjudged that by at least a couple of cup sizes.

No Country for Old Men (8/10)

On Sunday, I saw No Country for Old Men. I will have to admit that I wasn’t all that excited based on the trailers and hadn’t originally planned on seeing it, but I was lured in by the high IMDB rating (it’s currently got an 8.9 overall, or an 8.6 from the top voters, which puts it at #27 on their Top 250 list), and also because by the time that I was ready to leave to go to the theater it was too late to make it to the showing of The Mist. I’ve been bitten in the past by going to see a movie based on its rating when I didn’t think that I’d much care for it based on the trailers, but in this case the trip was worth it.

The basic premise for the movie is that a man (played by Josh Brolin) is out hunting near his west Texas home when he happens across the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. He comes across a satchel containing $2 million, which makes him the prime target for the ultimate bad guy (played by Javier Bardem), whose slow persistence and emotional detachment would seem right at home in the best horror movies. Add in a sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones trying to track both of them down, a bounty hunter played by Woody Harrelson, and cameos by Stephen Root, Barry Corbin, and Beth Grant, and there are very few slow spots in the two hour runtime.

The only real complaint that I have about the movie regards a scene near the end with Tommy Lee Jones investigating the aftermath of a gunfight at an El Paso hotel. I don’t want to give too much away, but its portrayal in the movie is just confusing. Apparently the book on which the movie is based explains it more clearly, but that explanation certainly isn’t one that would have immediately come to mind when watching it on screen, and I’ve read several comments suggesting that in fact something different happened in the movie. It’s not really a critical scene, but the way it played out was a bit of a letdown when compared with the tension leading up to it.

Overall, though, it was a very good movie. There’s not a lot of predictability to it, and it will definitely leave you thinking.