Sun Mulling GPL for Solaris

comforteagle writes "According to this article in InfoWorld, Sun Microsystems is considering open sourcing Solaris by changing licenses to the GPL. What kind of impact would this have on those of you considering opting out of Unix for Linux? Red Hat and others have openly targeted Solaris users to switch." By the end of the article, the change seems rather unlikely to happen, but it's still interesting to see what changes this could bring about.

Comments

education

[ezelkow1]

Im not sure how this would affect the business world, but here at least it would most likely spread more understanding of *nix. Most of the apps we use here in classes, various Programming/Asic/Chip design programs, are only run on solaris boxes. If solaris were available for free, i have a feeling many students would install it on their system, just to more easily use these apps if for nothing else.

Solaris user

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Solaris user. OK, I'm a Red Hat Linux user too. But all of my important stuff happens on Solaris. It's just part of my reality at work.

I wouldn't mind if Solaris opened up. It wouldn't be a huge deal for me - I'd still pay Sun for "premium" support, and I'd still only use official Sun versions of things. Heck, I need someone big to blame if and when things go really wrong. I pay Sun to be that target.

I use Sun/Solaris because (1) I have the budget to, (2) it works, (3) I only have one vendor to deal with, and (4) there's no compelling reason to change right now.

If Sun can get something out of opening Solaris - great! If open source developers can improve the world by the opening of Solaris - great! But at least in terms of my current position, it won't have direct impact on me.

Re:Why?

[jc42]

An explanation that I've found very effective over the years:

Way back in the 1980's, I worked on a number of projects that had teams building their software on a number of different kinds of small computer systems. The teams using Sun workstations often got a bit of flak for using a system with a fairly high price/performance ratio. But the Sun-based teams invariably had the last laugh.

What happened was that debugging would frequently lead into parts of "the system", i.e., system libraries and/or the kernel. When we asked the vendor for details of the low-level software, the answer would reduce to "We can't tell you; it's proprietary". The proprietary, closed-source parts of the systems were brick walls that blocked progress.

With Sun (SunOS or Solaris), if we couldn't get an immediate answer from Sun, we would just ask on one of the Sun newsgroups. Usually an answer would come back within hours, most often from an engineer within Sun. Very often, they would include a chunk of the source code as an explanation.

The result was that the teams developing on Suns would get answers to their technical questions, and would have a functioning product long before any of the other teams. There's a real advantage to having a working, marketable product, even if it's more expensive than a competitor that doesn't work yet.

Over the years, this Sun advantage has evaporated. It has slowly become more difficult to get accurate details on the inner working of Solaris and other Sun libraries and tools. They have gone the protective, proprietary route. And their market is slowly being eaten by linux, for exactly the same reasons as above.

It's possible that what is happening inside Sun is that the people who understand this are starting to be heard again. If they can make the innards of their system as open as it was 20 years ago, they stand a good chance of recovering their business.

Alternatively, if the protectionist factions inside Sun prevail, they could also start up a linux-based line. This would be a bit of an expense, but no more so than their switch from SunOS to Solaris (i.e., from BSD to Sys/V) 15 or so years ago. If they did this, a Sun linux would probably wipe out Solaris over a few years, for the same reasons of faster development times on an open system.

The cheapest would be to open-source Solaris. This would get them back into the good graces of software developers, and would restore their earlier status as a system on which you can bring a debugged, reliable product to market very quickly.

And it would probably be better for all of us, since it would avoid the growing threat of a linux "monoculture". The unix part of the industry has always been better off because it isn't a monoculture, and thus isn't susceptible to the virus/worm-type attacks of the "market leader".

But there are those elephants hiding in the middle of the room: patent and copyright. Can Sun legally open-source all of Solaris? If they try it, can they withstand the legal might of an SCO with behind-the-scene Microsoft support? Stay tuned ...

Re:Why?

[jc42]

I don't think, that there is a big thread for Linux to become a monoculture or proriety. (This would be the thread, Jonathan Schwartz was bashed here a few days ago, right?).

Yeah, you're probably right. The linux landscape is the metaphoric "herd of cats".

But still, we should be aware of the potential problem, and we should discuss it. It's similar to how we shouldn't be too smug about the linux (and *BSD) security question. In both cases, we're muuch better off if we constantly harp on such problems, and point fingers at potential problems.

In the case of the monoculture, there is indeed a real potential for problems in the business arena. The business world has always favored a monoculture, as a way to simplify decision making (which can be costly in both money and careers). In the corporate linux market, RedHat has a strong lead, and there's a serious possibility that they could end up ruling the linux business world.

RedHat deserves a lot of credit and support for what they've done. But "winning" and vanquishing their competition could make them a target for the virus/worm plague that has infected the Windows user community. Granted, writing such software for linux is much more difficult than with Windows, but it's not impossible that a single distro would have an exploitable hole. Then we could see half the banking system or half the credit industry going offline simultaneously.

So we should be preaching to the business folks about the dangers of putting all their corporate eggs in the RedHat basket. We should teach them that part of the reason for all the Windows problems is the monoculture. They should intentionally use different distros, configure them differently, run different DBs, etc. They should look for ways to tailor their systems to their environment, so that they aren't too similar to other computers.

And we should be on the lookout for other such developments. We want a herd of cats, not a flock of sheep, to help prevent the single points of failure that results from widespread use of a single distro. If we make serious sales to the non-tech world, we should fight the widespread desire to have a single "one size fits all" computer that everyone is pressured to buy.