Sun is in the process of turning itself into an open source company, or trying to. For the Java community, this mainly means the open sourcing of Java itself, which one would think would put Java at the heart of the open source action. But there are other, unrelated initiatives, too, such as the open sourcing of Solaris. And now, Sun has launched (quietly, in Tim Bray’s own words) Project Kenai, a Ruby-on-Rails-based repository for open source projects. The project’s tagline — “we’re more than just a forge” — seems like a call-out to SourceForge and the like. Anyway, on Tim Bray’s blog there’s a mini-interview with Nick Sieger, one of the project ringleaders, in which he has the following interesting thing to say: We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control; we need to demonstrate credibility in building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE); and we need to show viability of Sun technologies and hardware for next-generation web applications. Predictably, most of the blowback was over the phrase “that we ourselves can control,” which caused much backtracking and promises that Sun has no interest in actually controlling the projects on the site. What jumps out at me, though, is the phrase “building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE)”. It’s not a repudiation of Java EE by any means — different platforms for different purposes, etc. — but I do feel like I smell the word “legacy” drifting around that sentence somewhere. Open Source