Open-source details hold up Solaris release

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Another skeptic is Bruce Perens, a prominent open-source advocate, who said Sun's track record isn't good. Sun released the source code of OpenOffice, an alternative to Microsoft Office, but built only a "miniscule" programming community around the project, he said.

And, Perens added, it's too late for open-source Solaris to make a difference. "If they had done it five years ago, everyone might be running OpenSolaris, but at this point Linux is a very advanced operating system," Perens said.

"Once it's open source, if there's any valuable technology in it, open-source guys will descend on it like a swarm of ants and carry away anything interesting."

--Eric Raymond, president,
Open Source Initiative

Schwartz said Sun hasn't ruled out releasing Solaris under the General Public License (GPL), the license that governs Linux. That would mean that elements of Solaris could theoretically be adopted in Linux, or vice-versa, though integration of core features could prove technologically difficult.

Programmers are sure to scrutinize the source code once it's available, Raymond said.

"Once it's open source, if there's any valuable technology in it, open-source guys will descend on it like a swarm of ants and carry away anything interesting," he said.

The licensing terms will give outsiders enough control that the open-source version of Solaris could conceivably diverge from the direction Sun wants to go, Weinberg said. "We can't say which direction the community is going to take things," he said. "Obviously we want to keep the differences to an absolute minimum."

The differences between the Sun and open-source versions of Solaris will be comparable to the differences between Red Hat's Enterprise Linux and the free but unsupported Fedora Core version, Schwartz said: Only the former will come with support and certification.

OpenSolaris will include all major features coming with Solaris 10: performance improvements, the Dtrace feature for teasing out computer performance details, N1 Grid Containers for splitting a server into independent machines, and predictive self-healing abilities.

Sun has gradually released many of these features in preview versions of Solaris 10 in recent months.

Some minor Solaris components won't be released, Weinberg said. Drivers, which let the operating system communicate with specific hardware devices, often include other companies' intellectual property. Such drivers won't be released, he said.

There will be one major component that won't arrive in the first version of Solaris 10: Janus, which lets Linux applications run unmodified on x86 Solaris. That feature likely will arrive in the first quarterly update of Solaris 10 and initially will run programs certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Weinberg said.

However, Sun won't yet pledge that those applications will run on Solaris. "We're not willing to make that guarantee, but we're looking at that," Weinberg said.

[scdecade]

Sun is crazy

Why in the world would Sun open source Solaris?!? There are only 3 industrial grade, highly scalable OS's in existance and IBM owns 2 of them. HP-UX is going to be EOL'ed. Microsoft is a horrible joke and seems to actually be getting worse. Linux doesn't scale, isn't as well supported as Solaris, and it's future evolution is hamstrung by its own "community". The only thing an open source "community" is good for is adding cosmetic features.