Sun opens its OpenSolaris operating system

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 15 Jun 2005 at 17:46

Sun Microsystems officially unveiled its OpenSolaris operating system, based on Solaris 10 code.

The open-source platform will form the future code-base of Sun's proprietary Solaris operating system, and will be distributed under Sun's OSI-approved CDDL (Common Development and Distribution Licence).

Sun has talked up open-sourcing Solaris ever since the build up to Solaris 10, and with yesterday's launch, just crept in within its second quarter deadline. In January, Sun also let loose its DTrace tuning utility under the CDDL.

However, while the CDDL may have the official approval of the (OSI) Open Source Initiative, it is incompatible with code distributed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). This notably excludes the Linux kernel and other elements of that operating system.

So while it's all smiles and handshakes at launch, Sun is well aware that the relationship between Solaris and Linux will be competitive.

Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Technology Evangelist, described it thus: 'I'd expect the two to develop a spirit of friendly competition. OpenSolaris starts on day one with innovations that are either absent from Linux or available in a much less evolved form, and I'm sure the Linux community won't take that laying down! Having real peer competition is good for both Linux and OpenSolaris and each will catalyze the innovation of the other.'

Sun was somewhat hamstrung in terms of what it could give away freely, even if it wanted to. For one, with the high-profile SCO case revolving around the supposed leak of Unix IP into the Linux community by IBM, fellow licensee Sun was limited in its options there. Similarly, while IBM has supported open source in terms of selling it, and setting staff to work on open-source projects, it still sells a wide range of its application software as proprietary code - it hasn't proffered up billions of dollars' worth of IP in the form of a complete operating system. Not to mention what its shareholders would make of such an act. And so neither has Sun.

Yet in making OpenSolaris a success, Sun still needs to foster a vibrant community around the platform, both in terms of numbers and stature. It claims nigh on 150 OpenSolaris Pilot Program participants are already engaged in the project.

OpenSolaris contains about 10 million lines of code. It is not clear whether all Solaris code has been transported across, as Sun has previously said that some components carried licensing terms that would prohibit this.

The direction for the platform will be governed by the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board (CAB). It counts Roy Fielding, co-creator of HTTP and Rich Teer, author of 'Solaris Systems Programming', among its members and is tasked 'to steward the evolution of the OpenSolaris community towards self-governance'.

But, like Java, the stewardship model has met with mixed response from some in the open source community. Sun argues there is a need to steer such projects in a way as to ensure that they don't 'fork' and result in incompatible iterations. But there have been many in the open source community calling on Sun to give these projects their own head and let them evolve naturally.

Sun says it is currently looking for contributors for 'testing code, fixing bugs, documenting processes, and suggesting RFEs' (change requests).

OpenSolaris source code, a new source browser, build tools, documentation, a community portal, mailing lists, blogs, and more are available at the opensolaris.org website.