Sun poised to take open-source Solaris step

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McNealy donned a penguin suit to show the company's newfound support for Linux.

It's good he took that suit off. Sun still sells Linux--75 percent to 80 percent of its x86 servers shipped with it rather than Solaris in Sun's most recent quarter--but now its energies are focused on Solaris. Linux is best run through Janus, a feature due to arrive in a coming Solaris x86 update to let it run Red Hat Linux programs unchanged.

One reason for the resurgent Solaris commitment: Sun wants its own technology to be in as much of what people buy as possible. Executives deride operating system companies for their reliance on hardware companies, deride Dell for its reliance on operating system companies, and deride IBM and Hewlett-Packard for not bringing their versions of Unix to x86 chips. Controlling more hardware and software means Sun can use profits in one area to fund competitive pricing in another.

One person delighted with the Solaris x86 situation is Alan DuBoff, a member of the "Secret Six" who helped reverse Sun's near-cancellation of Solaris x86 in 2002. He's seen abundant evidence that Sun has grown serious about Solaris x86 since the company hired him in 2003.

"It's always been a problem inside Sun to have people run Solaris on x86. Now everybody in engineering runs it. Everybody is working on Opteron systems," DuBoff said.

Luring outside programmers
And Sun has been wooing dozens of programmers and others involved in the open-source realm to join the OpenSolaris pilot program. It's had some successes with programmers such as Pieter Van den Abeele, who's involved with one of the most developer-oriented versions of Linux, Gentoo. Gentoo relies on software called Portage that downloads software packages or even builds them from scratch out of source code; a Solaris version called Portaris is under development.

"I am pleased to announce that Gentoo is considering integrating OpenSolaris support into the machine-readable knowledge base we call Portage," Van den Abeele said in his blog this month. "Gentoo/OpenSolaris is born."

And some programmers outside Sun already are primed. One pioneer has been Masayuki Murayama, who has written drivers for 13 network cards. "I'm working on getting those inside the distribution so people won't have to download them," DuBoff said. He's already cleared the way with Sun's legal staff.

Another is Philip Brown, who like DuBoff was a Secret Six member. He's written several driverrs needed to let Solaris x86 communicate with specific devices such as Wacom graphics tablets.

Although Brown doesn't expect Sun to pick up his software, he does let people use it freely, and he would like to see some of what Sun likely hopes to foster with open-source community. "Ideally, I would be able to exchange source code with others who wish to contribute to Solaris," he said in an e-mail interview, though he said he's not particular whether that's done through an open process or restrictive nondisclosure agreements.

Can Sun open up?
A developer who's more guarded about Sun's OpenSolaris prospects is Garett D'Amore, a former Sun employee who now works for Unix laptop maker Tadpole Computer and who's written Solaris drivers.

"Open Solaris is going to be a real test, I think, because frankly, in all of my previous experiences with Sun--both inside Sun and outside--the Solaris engineering group has a huge NIH (not invented here) factor," D'Amore said. "I've seen perfectly good, working products killed when they tried to integrate into Solaris only because they originated from somewhere outside of the Solaris engineering team."

Not that Linux is without blemish, though. "Anyone who spends very much time in the Linux kernel may find themselves coming away with the feeling that it feels like it was developed by 10,000 developers, all of whom speak different languages," which isn't far from the truth, D'Amore said.

Whether OpenSolaris succeeds is now up to Sun, and what it copies and avoids in Linux will be crucial.

"Making OpenSolaris follow the development model of Linux won't serve anyone," D'Amore said. "If it is not done carefully, it will be worse than leaving it closed."

[peterichards]

Sun CDDL for Open Solaris

"Sources familiar with the matter"?

Jonathan Schwartz on vnunet.com last weekL
"The fact that the OSI approved the [CDDL] licence gives us carte
blanche to leverage that or the BSD licence or the General Public
Licence [GPL] in the release of Solaris."

http://www.vnunet.com/news/1160643