Sun used strong-arm tactics and made threats to the owners of an open-source directory project to wrestle away control, according to one of the former owners and creators of the project.In the process, Sun potentially has torn a gaping hole in the OpenDS (directory service) project, which is creating a free Java-based directory service for large deployments that offers high performance, extensibility and management.Neil Wilson, who was the co-founder, co-owner and committer of OpenDS and a Sun employee before he was laid off in September, said on his blog and in an interview with Network World, that Sun threatened to terminate his severance benefits and those of three other recently laid-off employees and co-owners of OpenDS if the foursome didn’t amend the OpenDS bylaws to cede control to Sun. Sun did not respond to requests for comments by the time this story was posted.“Owners” of open source projects establish the work’s governance and its goals, guide the community effort and resolve disputes among project contributors, among other activities.The OpenDS bylaws state that governance changes can only be made by a consensus of the project owners, which is standard language for project bylaws, and Wilson says Sun forced him and the others to give up ownership so the vendor could control who was spearheading OpenDS. “I don’t think at the time they did it [layoffs] that they realized they had laid off the entire ownership of the project. I think they did not know how to handle that,” Wilson said.On Nov. 14, Wilson said, a Sun executive demanded during a call with one of the four OpenDS co-owners that the owners approve a governance change that would grant Sun full control of the OpenDS project. It was during that call that the co-owner was threatened with the loss of their severance benefits, Wilson said. The threat was not made directly to Wilson, but was directed at all four co-owners, he said.“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,” Wilson wrote on his blog. Sun wanted the amendment so the project could be “controlled entirely by a Sun-selected committee,” Wilson said.Wilson said the foursome took Sun’s threats seriously and all feared losing significant financial compensation. Wilson wrote they “were ultimately compelled to resign our ownership and end our association with the project on November 19, 2007.”Wilson said he is speaking out now because he is officially no longer a Sun employee and to explain his absence from the OpenDS project. Wilson said he thinks Sun’s move does not represent Sun’s true open source strategy. He says it “was a relatively isolated incident brought on by middle management acting of their own accord.”But he wrote on his blog: “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.”Wilson, along with former Sun staffers Stephen Shoaff, Don Bowen, and David Ely were the co-owners and co-founders of OpenDS, while Trey Drake was the OpenDS community manager. Wilson, the OpenDS architect, has since resigned all roles that he held in the project and has rescinded his Sun Contributor Agreement. He said he will no longer contribute code, documentation, bug reports, suggestions for improvement, or advice of any kind.By alienating Wilson – who was the project’s architect and has written more than 50% of the code – Sun has lost OpenDS’s most valuable and knowledgeable contributor to date.Even Wilson’s competition lamented his absence. “I’ve sent some negative comments your way in the past but I’ve always respected your commitment to open source development and your dedication to improving the LDAP landscape. I’m very sorry to hear about this,” wrote Howad Chu in the comments section of Wilson’s blog post. Chu is chief architect of both the OpenLDAP project and Symas Corp.The company blog at Symas, a major proponent of OpenLDAP, also picked up the thread: “Sun just threw a large bucket of ice on their open source reputation no matter how you read it. I haven’t looked at OpenDS’s license, but it’s tough to be comfortable with Sun’s openness after a move like this.”One source who requested anonymity said, “It would be a shame if a goliath got away with this.” The accusations that Sun bullied the project owners come at a time when the company is actively working to position itself as a leader in the open source community.The effort has not been without its hiccups as Sun has butted heads with high-profile open source leaders, including Linus Torvalds, who have questioned Sun’s open source motives.Steve Giovannetti, who authors the GioList blog wrote, “Some of the recent halo Sun has is due to its efforts in open source. A blunder like this could really tarnish what their executives are trying to accomplish.” Giovannetti is CTO of HubCity Media, a Sun partner in the identity management arena.OpenDS started as a skunkworks project inside of Sun to create a directory service written completely in Java. The current proprietary Sun directory is written in C and based on code dating to 1994.OpenDS became an open source effort in part due to a declaration by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz that all Sun software projects should go open source. The FAQ on the OpenDS Web site says Sun turned the project over to open source because “Sun believes very strongly in the value of open source, and is one of the top contributors to open source software.”But it appears that the company was unwilling to be left out of OpenDS oversight.“It could be perceived as a disadvantage to not have control,” said Wilson. “It all depends on how the ownership behaves. As owners we would have the capability to cause them some grief, but that was never our intention.” Wilson said after the layoffs that the four owners decided to continue working on OpenDS and held face-to-face meetings, conference calls, and e-mail discussions with Sun employees still involved in OpenDS “to provide advice and knowledge transfers.”The OpenDS owners even went as far as electing a fifth project owner, Sun employee Ludovic Poitou, so that Sun would continue to have a stake in OpenDS.“The project owners decided that as an act of good faith and without any prompting from Sun that we should elect a fifth owner since Sun had certainly made a significant contribution to the project,” Wilson said. Wilson and his five colleagues were laid off in September when Sun consolidated its Directory Server engineering group in Grenoble, France, and eliminated its U.S.-based positions.The one swift move caught Wilson and the others by surprise.“I’m not upset at Sun,” said Wilson. “But certainly there was hurt when the threat was leveled.” Wilson said Sun refused to resolve the issue through “amicable avenues.”“Certainly as the owners we tried to extend an olive branch,” Wilson said. “We appointed another owner who was a Sun employee and we met with them to discuss granting Sun a permanent seat on the project.” JavaOpen Source