Posted on 01/26/2005 8:12:26 AM PST by ShadowAce
Sun Microsystems (Profile, Products, Articles) on Tuesday launched its OpenSolaris program, which provides access to the Solaris operating system via an open source format, and also announced the release of 1,670 patents to the open source community.
The initial piece of Solaris being made available now is DTrace performance analysis technology. Other Solaris source code, such as file system and security technologies, will be offered in the second quarter of this year.
Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy, a surprise participant on Tuesday’s conference call pertaining to the announcements, declared Sun as likely the largest donor of code anywhere on the planet.
“We’ve been doing this open source thing for nearly 24 years now,” beginning with the use of the Berkeley Software Distribution derivative of Unix, he said.
“You can use [Solaris] free. Did I say free? I meant free,” said McNealy.
Solaris source code and the patents will be made available under Sun’s Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which has been approved by the Open Source Initiative and is based on the Mozilla Public License.
Sun also will form a Community Advisory Board to oversee the evolution of OpenSolaris OS technology and promote community development efforts. Formation is planned for March, with the panel to include two Sun employees, two from the OpenSolaris Pilot community and someone from the open source community.
The company plans to open source as much of Solaris as possible under the CDDL. Some components, such as drivers based on intellectual property from other companies, will be offered only as binary code, according to Sun.
The patent release, which follows IBM’s (Profile, Products, Articles) donation of 500 patents last week, pertains to active Sun patents for all aspects of operating systems technologies, ranging from kernel and file system technologies to network management. Users are indemnified in using the patents. “This is real IP and we stand behind it,” said John Loiacono, Sun executive vice president of software.
Taking an apparent potshot at IBM without mentioning the rival vendor by name, McNealy stressed the usefulness of the technologies being made available under open source.
“Unlike a lot of companies using open source to dispose of end-of-life code, we have taken Solaris 10, the hottest OS on the planet with the latest and greatest features, and committed that to [open source],” McNealy said.
Developers who modify the Solaris source code must donate the modifications back to the community. But developers who use the code without modifying files may combine it with files from other sources and use it in commercial products without donating it, according to Sun officials.
Sun with its open source moves is looking to reach markets such as entertainment, government, and education, Loiacono said. “We’re talking about roughly 10 million lines of code” being made available, he added.
The company will continue to offer the commercial version of Solaris with services and support to meet the needs of enterprise customers, Sun officials said.
Doug Eney, vice president of IS engineering with Carnival Cruise Lines, welcomed the idea of an open source Solaris, but said he was happy with Sun’s commercial offerings and had no plans to actually begin compiling source code. "Why would I do that? What upside is there?" he asked.
"Open source Unix isn't gong to change anything dramatically where I'm going to cut my IT budget in half,” said Eney. Carnival uses Solaris systems as part of its booking and mail systems, he said.
An analyst was pleased with the CDDL. “I like the CDDL license,” said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. “No. 1, it gives you a lot more protection than the Apache license.”
Additionally, the CDDL lacks the “viral” impact of the GNU Public License (GPL), which requires that anything affected by it also be offered under the GPL, Manes said.
“Sun’s license says I can put this thing into a file and anything that’s in that file has to be CDDL but anything can use that file,” without requiring it be licensed under the CDDL, she said.
Sun officials also stressed the open source initiative is an attempt to broaden the base for Solaris, to boost development on the platform and sell ancillary products, such as software tools. Sun maintains rights to the Solaris trademark.
Very, very cool. :-)
Open Source/patent ping
"And we should not just compare Open Solaris to Linux, we should also carefully compare it to Windows Server System," Gardner said. "On issues of datacenter performance, security, and cost over time, those Unix shops considering a move to Windows should take a hard look at Solaris and Open Solaris in tandem."
Hard to see how this is going to have a positive effect on Sun. But might as well stir the pot, because Sun has nothing to lose at this point. If they can't get things moving in a different direction, they're merger meat.
bttt
Heh heh heh.
I have a few systems with SOl10 beta - it ROCKS! Zones, Dtrace, etc. plus the forthcoming ZFS filesystem... oh my...
You've got that right. I'm actually surprised they have lasted as long as they have. Perhaps potential buyers can't quite figure out what market sun is selling to.
$11 billion in sales. They have a market, it's just not the one that most people are exposed to. High powered workstations, backoffice systems, mass storage, etc.
An unfortunate development for all.
In the big picture, the invasion of free and open source software like Linux is forcing US technology companies to expose their previously private industrial secrets to the world.
In the smaller picture, this is just further fragmentation of the *nix sector, now having yet another ecosystem divided by software licensing restrictions.
The problem is the cash. They've got a substantial amount of it (plus bonds and mutual funds) set aside. It is estimated that based on only the banked assets, and ignoring all other valuation (perceived or otherwise) that you're talking a least a couple bucks a share. Anyone courting them would need to buy out the banked assets plus whatever the valuation analysis recommends, and therein lies the inhibitor to making the type of deal that shareholders would accept.
What is all of that???
Unfortunately now however Sun will no longer be offering the same levels of protection of US intellectual property, as it was when it was closed source and I was endorsing it.
It is however still a better choice than Linux, as OpenSolaris will be somewhat incompatible with Linux's GPL license, the preferred weapon of "free software" lunatics like Richard Stallman. Here's what he's been up to lately, if you haven't been keeping up:
http://www.stallman.org/archives/2004-nov-feb.html
crap I did not realize that there was a liberal in the OSS community, damn I guess I better go to MS.. oh wait Gates is a huge liberal who gives money to planned parenthood and the UN eugenics errr population control outfit... Guess I need to go with a pen and pencil... Golly I hope nobody at the paper factory is a liberal..
What US IP? This belongs to Sun--not the US. They can do what they want with it.
Dtrace = the ability to run a script that can monitor or collect info from the kernel in realtime, including system calls, etc.
ZFS = Zetabyte filesystem. You just add disks to a pool of disks and the ZFS lets you dynamically add/remove/grow/shrink filesystems. A combination of a journaling filesystem with automatic tuning and fault tolerance.
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