Solaris

Sun's Ian Murdock on OpenSolaris and Linux

InfoWorld's Paul Krill interviewed Ian Murdock at JavaOne and got some good tidbits including Murdocks' thoughts on making money with open source and the licensing issues associated with CDDL and GPL.

I think the big question around open source is how do you make money from it? And it's because the software industry has traditionally been built on an intellectual property licensing model. But the reality of the situation is with the rise of open-source software, developers don't buy things anymore. [It is] a world where you can go to the Web and download just about anything … Read more

Sun's OpenSolaris on EC2--overcast but not completely Cloudy

With JavaOne starting tomorrow I have been waiting to see what kind of interesting things Sun will be launching. If OpenSolaris + EC2 is the best they've got it may be a long week.

Some interesting vendors are running their software on the OS-EC2 platform. For example, GigaSpaces provides software for highly distributed, highly available environments and running it as a Cloud application is cool when you consider that most enterprises are not that keen on the fact that servers in the cloud are just part of the distributed network.

It also makes sense to run Zmanda in the Cloud, … Read more

Sun launches bundled OpenSolaris in latest push for developer support

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems gave developers a gift at the CommunityOne developer conference on Monday--a packaged version of OpenSolaris with a new logo. Now, Sun is hoping developers will return the favor by creating applications to run on the open-source version of its Solaris operating system and thus drive more demand for its servers and software.

The move is the latest in Sun's effort in the better part of a decade to regain relevance in a post-dot-com bust world by transforming into an open source player. Borrowing a trick from Microsoft and its own early successes with Java, Sun … Read more

Sun launches OpenSolaris, inks deal with Amazon

Sun Microsystems on Monday said it has released OpenSolaris, an open source version of its Solaris operating system, and announced a deal with Amazon.com.

The OpenSolaris project has been under development for more than three years. Sun hopes to popularize the operating system with developers, students and other traditional Linux users.

In addition, Sun said it has partnered with Amazon.com to release OpenSolaris as an on-demand service as part of Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). OpenSolaris will be available for operating system and storage services as part of the overall EC2 service, which starts at 10 … Read more

The difficulty of building community around commercial: The OpenSolaris example

Ted T'so writes an excellent analysis of Sun Microsystems' attempts to build a community around its Open Solaris project. In so doing, he ends up uncovering a much larger issue: The difficulty of getting community development around projects that are hosted and serve corporations.

But first, the critique:

...(I)f you run into a Sun salescritter or a Sun CEO claiming that OpenSolaris is just like Linux, it's not. Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community. Maybe it will be someday, as some Sun executives have claimed, but it's definitely not a priority by Sun; if it was, it would have been done before now. And why not? After all, they are getting all of the marketing benefit of claiming that Solaris is "just like Linux", without having to deal with any of the messy costs of working with an outside community.

Probably fair, but let's assume that Sun really, really, really wants to have outside developers contribute to Open Solaris? What's keeping that back (other than apparently poor developer tools, which he describes). As he writes in response to Brian Akers' distinction between "sponsored" (corporate) and non-sponsored communities:… Read more

Sun offers fast track to online apps

Sun Microsystems is launching a program to help software makers convert their existing, on-premise applications into software-as-a-service offerings.

The Solaris On Demand program, announced on Wednesday, is targeted at independent software vendors. Sun offers the software, hosting and services to convert applications. Sun says it is partnering with NaviSite. AT&T's USi Communications, and NTT Europe to provide hosting services.

Sun, along with partners, will offer a 90-day proof-of-concept trial to give independent software vendors access to hosting, hardware managed services, and backup services. The company guarantees a service level agreement of 99.5 percent uptime.

The service … Read more

Sun, Solaris, and a new chance to shine

With 12 million Solaris licenses now in the market, Sun's Solaris is no slouch. And while people like I talk up Red Hat's clean-up of the "certification market" [PDF] (with over 3,000 applications certified for RHEL), the chart below indicates that Solaris actually has a pretty compelling application certification story to tell.

The question is, "Is it enough?"

A few days ago I suggested that Sun would be wise to partner closely with Ubuntu (Read: Acquire Canonical). It seems the easiest route to continued open-source momentum as Linux vendors continue to cut into Unix. But there's a compelling story in the Solaris numbers that suggests that it may live on for a very long time.… Read more

15 minutes with Jonathan Schwartz: Java and Linux

Sun formally completed its acquisition of MySQL on Tuesday. I was fortunate to spend 15 minutes on the phone with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, after the press conference.

I asked him a range of questions about criticism of Sun over Linux, as well as whether the MySQL integration would be as prickly as Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss was at times.

As usual, Schwartz didn't disappoint.

The Linux Foundation's Amanda McPherson recently called you out over Sun's continued push for Solaris despite Linux's rise. Why aren't you giving up?… Read more

Apache co-founder quits Sun over its alleged culture of control

Over the years, Sun has been progressively pushed by the open-source community to open up. OpenOffice, Java, etc.: the company's efforts to embrace open source have never been quite enough for some.

For Valentine's Day this year, Sun received another arrow, this time from Roy Fielding, co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server Project, who quit Sun to protest its alleged inability to relax its control over OpenSolaris and truly forge a community around it. As Fielding notes:

Sun didn't just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris; they made promises about it being an open development project. … Read more