OpenSolaris

Lacking Oracle help, OpenSolaris group disbands

An end has come to a major part of Sun Microsystems' attempt to transform Solaris from a proprietary version of Unix to an open-source operating system built by others, too.

Instead of becoming a rival to the broadly developed Linux operating system, control over the OpenSolaris project essentially on Monday reverted to its new corporate master, Oracle, which acquired Sun and its assets in January. After Oracle gave the group the cold shoulder, the OpenSolaris Governing Board voted unanimously to disband, according to meeting minutes.

Some of the initiative to build an open-source version of Solaris remains at a new project called Illumos, … Read more

Oracle apparently shuts doors on OpenSolaris

Five years after Sun Microsystems began a bold effort to rejuvenate Solaris by attracting outside programming involvement, Oracle apparently is scrapping what remains of the OpenSolaris project.

Oracle acquired the Sun version of Unix in January, but has shown little of Sun's interest in building a vibrant external community of programmers around Solaris to match some of Linux's collaborative advantages. The OpenSolaris board has been left in limbo with no contact from the company for months. Even with no official communications, though, Oracle's inattention sent a strong indirect message that OpenSolaris wasn't on the company's … Read more

OpenSolaris board in OpenRevolt against Oracle

One of Sun Microsystems' ambitious dreams, a vibrant open-source community for the Solaris operating system to rival the Linux collective, is in serious danger of evaporating in the Oracle era.

Oracle is committed to Solaris, a version of Unix, but the future of the open-source OpenSolaris project is in limbo, and the OpenSolaris Governing Board that oversees the open-source community is threatening to disband.

Sun poured resources into the OpenSolaris project in an attempt to give it some of the new-era flavor and developer attention devoted to rival Linux. After Oracle's acquisition of Sun, though, the board is struggling … Read more

Sun adds enterprise features to OpenSolaris

Sun is set to launch the latest version of OpenSolaris, tuning it for the enterprise with a new support contract, processor support, and networking and storage technology.

Sun, which is in the process of being acquired by Oracle, is expected to introduce OpenSolaris 2009.06 on Monday at the CommunityOne developer conference in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is the open-source version of Solaris, and previously it has been aimed mainly at developers and as a platform for testing features that will later make their way into Solaris itself.

The new version, however, will be offered with an enterprise-grade support contract that … Read more

Q&A: Sun open-source officer Simon Phipps

As the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, Simon Phipps spoke to ZDNet Australia about the MySQL acquisition and community engagement on OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.

Q: In the beginning of 2008, Sun spent $1 billion on the acquisition of MySQL. Given Sun's huge reduction in Australian revenue, and the global shedding of jobs, was this a prudent acquisition? Phipps: It's a bit soon to be making that sort of judgment. Asking that question now is a bit like asking a company to change its product strategy on the basis of the share price.

MySQL is a long-term … Read more

Torvalds: Linux and OpenSolaris a tough mix

It should be obvious, but the more I talk to people about open source, and where and how it's useful, the more I'm surprised by how overinflated (or underinflated) expectations often are for open source.

One case in point is with the utility of source code as a way to save time and money, rather than reinventing the wheel. For example, Alfresco, my employer, was able to get its initial content management product to a 1.0 state in less than six months because it heavily borrowed from successful open-source projects such as Hibernate, Spring, PDFbox, and others.… Read more

Google considered a move to OpenSolaris? All that glitters is not Chrome

CORRECTION at 6:30 a.m. PDT September 2: This blog inadvertently had linked to old information about Google's work with OpenSolaris. However, having discovered the mistake, the author realizes how salient the content is to Google's announcement Monday of its new browser.

Two years ago, Computerworld reported that Google was actively testing Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris Unix distribution as a possible adjunct operating system to be used internally with its existing modified Linux distribution. While I'm sure there continues to be active experimentation at Google around OpenSolaris, I suspect any move away from Linux remains highly unlikely, … Read more

Sun's OpenSolaris on EC2--overcast but not completely Cloudy

With JavaOne starting tomorrow I have been waiting to see what kind of interesting things Sun will be launching. If OpenSolaris + EC2 is the best they've got it may be a long week.

Some interesting vendors are running their software on the OS-EC2 platform. For example, GigaSpaces provides software for highly distributed, highly available environments and running it as a Cloud application is cool when you consider that most enterprises are not that keen on the fact that servers in the cloud are just part of the distributed network.

It also makes sense to run Zmanda in the Cloud, … Read more

Sun launches bundled OpenSolaris in latest push for developer support

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems gave developers a gift at the CommunityOne developer conference on Monday--a packaged version of OpenSolaris with a new logo. Now, Sun is hoping developers will return the favor by creating applications to run on the open-source version of its Solaris operating system and thus drive more demand for its servers and software.

The move is the latest in Sun's effort in the better part of a decade to regain relevance in a post-dot-com bust world by transforming into an open source player. Borrowing a trick from Microsoft and its own early successes with Java, Sun … Read more

The difficulty of building community around commercial: The OpenSolaris example

Ted T'so writes an excellent analysis of Sun Microsystems' attempts to build a community around its Open Solaris project. In so doing, he ends up uncovering a much larger issue: The difficulty of getting community development around projects that are hosted and serve corporations.

But first, the critique:

...(I)f you run into a Sun salescritter or a Sun CEO claiming that OpenSolaris is just like Linux, it's not. Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community. Maybe it will be someday, as some Sun executives have claimed, but it's definitely not a priority by Sun; if it was, it would have been done before now. And why not? After all, they are getting all of the marketing benefit of claiming that Solaris is "just like Linux", without having to deal with any of the messy costs of working with an outside community.

Probably fair, but let's assume that Sun really, really, really wants to have outside developers contribute to Open Solaris? What's keeping that back (other than apparently poor developer tools, which he describes). As he writes in response to Brian Akers' distinction between "sponsored" (corporate) and non-sponsored communities:… Read more