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Sun COO Schwartz Promises Open Source Solaris
Alapan writes "According to C-Net Asia, Sun plans to make Solaris open source soon. While I hardly expect Sun to make it GPL compatible, I wonder how much restrictions Sun will place on distributing modified solaris systems. And will we some integration of Solaris' strong points into other open source OSes like Linux and BSD?" Update: 06/02 14:16 GMT by T : Correction: Schwartz is Sun's COO and President, but not CEO (as the headline originally had it).
Doesn't anyone else find it strange that we have a Microsoft and Sun deal and now Sun starts touting, "You should not be using Linux, as some day we are going to be making Solaris open source." Yeah sure but are we certain that "some day" will arrive? It has long been a tactic of M$ to announce something as being "almost ready" to forestall interest in a competing product that they really have no answer for. Then by creating enough uncertainty and doubt, they repeatedly harm their competitors with vaporware announcements.
Well, when I say excel, I should really say it in the past tense. Being, really, since the SPARC platform went PCI the whole thing went downhill. But, sun still has some good offerings on the hardware side, and are (supposedly) working on new ones. I think building your own CPU is orders of magnitude harder than writing a "Yet Another Unix Clone" (especially now).
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
...Considering how they licensed their Gnome-based Java Desktop System. And that software was LGPL to begin with! Pray tell, what kind of god-awful monstrocity of a license are they going to come up with Solaris!?
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"Look, you only need to look at what we've done with Java to understand how Sun views the value of incorporating community feedback. Java could not exist if only Sun is supporting it. It exists because there are hundreds and thousands of partners. We need to now take the model with Java and bring it to Solaris," he said.
... according to Mr. Schwartz, Solaris will be open source soon, just like Java is open source today. Evidently this is some new definition of "open source" that I was not previously aware of.
Ok, so
I want some of whatever he's been smoking.
It's a shame, because if they would truly open source Solaris and Java, the open source community would rally around both products and actually help Sun get out of the death spiral they seem to be in right now. If they have any doubt about that, all they have to do is look in their own source repositories to see how well it's worked for OpenOffice.org.
Sun needs a regime change. The current crop of morons are not fit for management.
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I don't know, but in my humble opinion, Solaris has a lot more going for it than does Linux. No, this isn't meant to be a troll or flamebait. I've used Solaris since 4.1.3 and through 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, and now 2.9 and can tell you that this is a really nice operating system. Simple, logical, and extremely robust. Granted, I've used it on SPARC machines and that is where it really shines. I have used 2.7 and 2.8 on the intel platform with decent results. Maybe it's just the familiarity and comfort level associated with working on Sun hardware, but Solaris is solid and a dream to work with. I've used (and still do) RedHat and SuSE and though they look good, and in many cases is more suited to the intel platform, I can't believe that if Sun took to making Solaris more available that more folks wouldn't use it. I know, you need applications and other vendor support, but still ... this is welcome news!
Solaris may end up open source, but you are going to find it work very much like Java.... if you want to make your own implementation, you have to follow VERY VERY strict guidelines as to maintain PERFECT compatibility.
I am sorry, but I dont want another linux mess, where there is a "Debian Solaris" and a "SESolaris", etc. I am happy with a single one... maybe two... for workstation and server.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Yes because C/C++ are such unsuccessful disasters. We wouldn't want Java to be anything like those languages.
Why? I dont see PHP, Python and other OS languages having this problem, why should Java?
They may not be unsuccessful, but the (sometimes wildly) different implimentations of C++ turns my stomach a bit. I think the way C++ evolved into its "stanard" over the 90s was analogous to watching a car wreck in slow motion. C++ is very, very powerful but also very fragmented by varying levels of support of templates, etc, etc, etc.
That said, I think that there could be an "official" Java release similar to Linus's official kernel, which the vast majority of the world use. I think plain old GPL Java would work very well.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Because SUN has partnerships with other vendors, they cannot release all of their OS code.
This is similar to when they released the Solaris 8 source code. I believe anyone could download it for some period of time, or at least it was really easy to get (partners || edu). However, even limiting their distribution channel, they were bound by contracts to vendors to not release parts of their code. I.e. a lot of the fibre source was written by Qlogic or JNIC, so none of that will be released, Open Source or not.
I have to think Sun will release their code, since the Solaris 8 code was pretty publicly available for quite some time. It wouldn't be a major step to release the code publicly now.