Closed Company

Suns Loiacono said the Open Solaris move would impact the entire company, not just on the software side. He called it an opportunity for Sun to gain access to new and emerging markets and to address the issues around the open-source requirements facing many governments and companies today. "It allows us to re-engage with our academic base and the students, as well as expanding the number of developers working on the code. We also wanted to address the perception that the company was closed," Loiacono said. All key components of Solaris 10 will be open-sourced, including the code for containers and DTrace, which will be available on SPARC, x86 and AMD Opteron hardware. The OpenSolaris.org Web site went live Tuesday and contained information about the project. However, the full, buildable source code for Solaris 10 will be available only in second quarter of the year, Loiacono said. Sun also plans a community advisory board consisting of two Sun employees, two members from outside Sun and one from the broader Sun community, and is taking nominations for the two outside positions. The board, whose members will be announced in March, will determine what processes are adopted going forward, Loiacono said. "There are a number of advantages of using the CDDL license, including that it makes it easy to reuse code; we cannot move users onto new licenses unless they agree to this; it makes it easier to follow and easier to use other code," he said. "We have cleaned up a lot of the definitions around sharing code. Users are also required to share and give back any modifications they make to the source code," Loiacono said. The reason Sun had shunned the GPL (GNU General Public License) was that it was "very viral and it is very difficult to co-mingle any other code with it. The only code that can be used with GPL code is GPLd code," he said. McNealy said the Open Solaris projects success will be measured by the number of new contributors and downloads, by adoption by other open-source communities, and by incorporation by OEMs. "It may well end up in scenarios we had not anticipated, like a set-top box or in a switching environment. We just dont know all the places it will go," he said. The software development model is changing, he said, and the community process model will gain greater traction going forward. "We are trying to get ahead of that and lead the pack. We are committed to Unix, to Solaris, to the Open Solaris community and to one word: sharing," McNealy said. "Weve always been about sharing, from open interfaces at the start. This is a model of back to the future, and this model with help developers, users and countries stand on the shoulders of our IP use model," he said. Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.