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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.
Addressing the question of how Sun plans to make money with an open-source Solaris, he simply said that Sun doesn't have to rely on only the operating system. "We have hardware, storage, services and support. What we are doing is taking that whole thing and selling that whole thing," he said.
This looks like the exact opposite approach of Apple, who makes really cool closed source software to sell their hardware.
It seems to me that it's pretty easy to slap together hardware systems, but developing software systems is a little more daunting of a task. In hardware, it's like putting legos together.
Software tries to do that too, but everybody and their brother tries to make a better lego, and so you end up with millions of incompatible partial solutions that are very difficult to build up into a complete solution.
I wonder if sun will accept comments on their system from those who write linux and BSD?
Evolution or ID?
Open Source Java is on its way?
On the subject of a probable licensing model for the open-source Solaris, John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun's Software Group, said: "We have to consider what licensing model we use and what levels of free usage we want.
I'll tell you what level of free you should use. The only one that exsists. FREE. Not free with reservations, not free with restrictions, not free blah blah blah, FREE.
Some time in the last few months, Sun Microsystems has lost their collective mind. Not that I don't agree with their decisions, but they have changed quite a bit. I'm just not sure yet whether it's good or bad.
Just yesterday we were talking about this...which just leaves me saying huh!? Unless they meant Shared-Source and not really OSI-Style open source...
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
So if the software is free and the hardware is free...
1. give away everything
2. ???
3. profit!
no seriously, do they think they can pull off a profit from providing support services a la red hat, or will they try to squeeze profit from their other software offerings? makes no sense to me... have then gone insane?
"And will we some integration of Solaris' strong points into other open source OSes like Linux and BSD?"
Mmmm. Some integration will we make.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
Sun's idea of "open source" is sometimes a peculiar one. What license will Solaris be OSed with?
Great news though... free hardware AND software from Sun. How does Sun make money? Volume!
Expected at end of year with Solaris 10: 64 bit on SPARC and AMD, 32 bit on Pentium
Would it be possible -and I'm no expert by any means- that this is a direct attack on Linux. By that I mean that in all likelyhood Sun will probably use a GPL incompatible license, and aim to steer development effort away from Linux and on to Solaris; over which they would have more control, causing, in essence, a fork in Linux Kernel Development. I bet Microsoft got a good deal of influence on Sun's business decisions for $2Billions.
Umm, I assume you have heard of Solaris X86 and also Sun's Opteron based servers.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
I guess he hasn't been talking to his COO lately, considering that just yesterday we were reading that Sun says that hardware will be free. So if Sun's hardware is going to be free, and their OS is going to be free, where do I sign up?
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
...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!?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
"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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This is an epic thing. If Sun does what Sun usually does and makes Solaris available under the BSD style licenses this will boost all unix like OS's. However I think they will end up using a Sun specific license (one that was developed for this specific purpose). I also think they did this because by opensourcing solaris they can start some serious cutbacks, a large amount of the OS can be handled by the community, and this might be a major cost cutting move motivated to save sun's ass.
Solaris has probably the best security and stability out of any of the widely used *nix's. Not to mention the superior threading of the actual OS and its core.
However the article makes mention of using something similar to java's licensing, which is *NOT* open source in any way shape or form. This sounds like another wait-and-see thing from the leader of wait-and-see (although not leading in much else these days.)
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
According to C-Net Asia, Sun plans to make Solaris open source soon.
Yep, just like they'll open source Java soon.
This is just another half-assed attempt of SUN trying to compete with IBM. Move along, nothing to see here...
-B
Java you morons, not Solaris. Almost nobody gives a flying fuck about whether Solaris is opened or not.
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!
do they think they can pull off a profit from providing support services
Yes, they have the experience and cred in the industry to do just that, unlike Red Hat who were (are) viewed as an upstart by many CTOs.
One thing holding back the adoption of Sun (and it was true in my office when we started looking to replace HP-9000 MPE based systems) is uncertainty as to the future of the OS. If we drop a boatload of cash into a bunch of Solaris boxes, and MSFT buys up and dissolves Sun tomorrow, then what?
Hell forget the hardware, what happens to our all our apps that we've tightly integrated into Solaris? Do we port all that stuff yet again to another unix?
With the source, that worry is gone. This is why Linux is succeeding, and because of Linux and the various free BSD's, folks who write checks are nervous about proprietary Unixes. Thing is, they want the support and expertise of a company like Sun, but they see the value in the openness of systems like Linux.
This is a very smart move on Sun's part, it'll push a lot of folks onto their side of the fence, and they should net a metric assload in support contracts and hardware sales.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
So don't hold your breath.
Is that free as in beer, speech, GPL, or BSD? Not everyone agrees what FREE means. The BSD crowd claims that the GPL is not free because you force people that use GPL code to release the source so you are limiting their freedom to do what they want with the code. The GPL people claim that the BSD people are letting the code be locked away. A lot of people only want free as in I don't pay for it.
Sun could say that it is GPL but only from the Sparc chip AKA QT. Which many feel is free but I do not.
Or it could be you get the source code but you may not sell your changes and must give them back to Sun so they can distrubute it to other Solaris users. This is Free as in getting free labor. Could it be free as in GPL but only for a single CPU?
I do not see it as free as in pure GPL or BSD but who knows.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Jonathan Schwartz is Sun Microsystems' president and chief operating officer, not CEO as the title, "Sun CEO Schwartz Promises Open Source Solaris" suggests!
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
What do you suppose the odds of that are?
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
No, the GPL says "here's the code, use it how you want but you have to give it back if you make a binary publicly available." This is one clearly-defined use condition that is easily met. The way you describe the GPL is more fitting of SharedSource or any of a number of other, proprietary vendor's license on source. Many of whom started with or included BSD-licensed code.
Open source but non-free (as in Freedom) software has its problems, even for those of us who love openness. There will always be some idiot developer who has been reading a lot of non-free, open Sun code who decides to contribute something to a GPL'ed project such as Linux - and boom, there you have it - disaster! It's "impossible" for the maintainers of Free software to be 100 % sure that contributed code is not already distributed under a non-Free license.
That's a disaster waiting to happen. Java needs to be under strict control, else we'll have a dozen forks that won't play nice with each other. Open Source and Free Software are all well and good, but when it comes to Java, I'm drawing a line in the sand. It's a noble goal, but not worth the risk of shattering the language. The "write once, run anywhere" mantra would go right out the window. It'll be like 1997 again.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
sun hardware: $0
solaris: $0
java: $0
watching the Sun go down: priceless
And will we some integration of Solaris' strong points into other open source OSes like Linux and BSD?"
I hope not, as unpredictable and indecisive as Scott McNealy is, Darl McBride is relatively stable.
One week McNealy likes Linux, the next week he doesn't. That and the fact after years of slamming Microsoft (as much as they deserve it), and making himself appear like a raving lunatic to the detriment of other important business decisions, Sun and Microsoft kiss and make up, and everything is suppossed to be OK now.
Well, its not OK, this looks like another desperate move by a company seeking something, anything to gain mindshare and revenue. If solaris becomes free, and their hardware will be free, how exactly is Sun supposed to make money again? And why should the open source community use source from Solaris from a company with such conflicting outlooks on open source and Linux?
Well I sure as heck have, and even breaks going from say RH 7.0 to 7.1 to 7.3 to 8 to 9! Let alone cross distro. Yes, recompiling from scratch usually gets you there, or changing environment variables to use old threading model, or installing 800 prereq RPMs that you don't already have, or removing some RPMs you have that break the code you want or.... Sure, no problem! Seriously - it IS a problem!
Oh im sorry. Did I not understand yesterday's Slashdot story? So they will make money from hardware, which they are saying will be free in a couple of years? Does Sun ever pay attention to what they release?
I think that the approach may be similar to the MPL (as I understood the 1.0 edition, the 1.1 Mozilla Public License is different) requiring people to submit to the Mozilla foundation the alterations that they had made to the code-base.
This allowed the foundation to maintain centralised control of the project without forked copies damaging it. I think that will allow Sun to nicely control Solaris.
Take care.
K3n.
Oh, come off it.
All it takes is them retaining the rights to the Java (TM) name, ala TeX. I.e. you can't call it Java (TM) if it's not compatible. Same thing goes for TCP/IP - that's been open source for a long time, and you don't see a million incompatible versions.
Enforce compatibility through test suites and (open) standards, not by grabbing everyone by the balls via a proprietary platform.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
As a community, the OSS kernel writers need to be very wary of this. Let's try this scenario:
1). Sun releases its code as a "open" with a non-GPL compatible license, possibly a license that states clearly that you cannot use the code in any other product.
2). OSS kernel contributor writes something similar to a Solaris feature into his patch, having read or not read the Solaris code, just because it "makes sense".
3). Sun pulls a SCO and starts suing everyone they can find for the misuse of its IP.
This move could very well poison the free kernel projects out there.
Language differences are utterly irrelevant. What is relevant (and what the poster points out rather cleverly) is that C/C++ is hugely popular, as cross-platform as you want it to be, etc.
There are lots of implementations of C/C++ that all interoperate perfectly well as long as the programmer sticks to specifications and the compilers do. It will be exactly the same with Java if it's opened up.
You shouldn't rely on the "guts of Java" (by which I assume you mean "implementation of Java") to be the same everywhere. You should rely on the Java specification (that's what it's for!).
HAND.
Please don't flame me! I love Solaris!
BUT: I humbly predict that when Solaris is opened, people will pour through the code and find (a) many old security holes, unpatched, and (b) many new security holes, due to the number of eyes on the code.
This will probably result in:
- Frequent patching for a while;
- Frequent security alerts for a while;
- Many hacks into existing unpatched systems;
- Cross-polination of good (security and other) ideas from Solaris into xxxBSD and Linux;
- Gradual settling down of security problems to even lower numbers than before.
This is not a dire prediction - Solaris is already Pretty Damned Secure - and it'll be an unmitigated Good Thing once the initial flurry of patches come through. I'm just concerned for the interim timeframe when "Security Through Obscurity" goes away and hasn't yet been replaced by "Security Through Code Quality".--Kevin (at justanyone dooooooooootttt cooooommmmmmm).
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
Sun is not doing anything Free or Open Source as we know it. they aren't even doing anything free or with open source. Yesterday they redefined "free" to mean "subsidized". today they are redefining "open source" as "all your base..." followed by "someone set us up the bomb"
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.
Yesterday, hardware was free. Today, software is free. Tomorrow, people working at Sun will be free... to go.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
Sometimes true. But it's worth mentioning that many PHBs (purchasers, CFOs, etc.) are fincancially rewarded based on the percentage or number of dollars "saved". Sure, it may not be the best technical (or financial) solution for their business, but if they are able to negotiate 30% savings on solution A versus 10% savings on solution B, they may get a much larger end-of-quarter bonus if they "save" the company the 30% by choosing option A.
You may want to chat with the folks (read: Board of Directors) who establish potentially counter-productive incentives like this.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
according to Mr. Schwartz, Solaris will be open source soon...
Actually, despite the headline's claim, Schwartz never actually said "soon"; in fact, he was very vague: 'I don't want to say when that will happen. But make no mistake, we will open source Solaris.'
So, what does that mean? At the latest possible hour, when all other options are exhausted?
And before we get too excited about an open Solaris, consider this: "one problem that Schwartz wants to avoid is having Solaris splintered into different distributions like Linux" (Ong Boon Kiat). If that statement is true, then it doesn't portend well for modified versions of the operating system, does it? I'm hoping that the author merely extrapolated from Schwartz' dim view of Red Hat.
A variety of Solaris distributions would be excellent, but it's probably not going to happen. John Loiacono of Sun adds: "We have to consider what licensing model we use and what levels of free usage we want. Then we also need to consider if we want to [segment the licensing model to address] commercial, private and academic use."
These deliberations suggest that the community will not get anything close to ideal licensing terms.
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.
True, but it's probably a pipe dream. Call me cynical, but it almost seems like Sun just wants free labor to bolster a dying product. I would be surprised if the eventual licensing terms concur with the notion of being "truly open source"; more like, "just open source enough to extract some patches and drivers from the open source development community." How many video cards do they support now? Six?
Don't get me wrong, I would love for Sun to open Solaris, but consider the source (no pun intended).
I'm not excessively familiar with Solaris from an admin standpoint, but I have done quite a bit of porting C/C++ stuff to it and a lot of admin'ing AIX. To be blunt, I don't care much for Solaris and should I ever be in the position to authorize a purchase I'd almost certainly look at Linux first and AIX second. Here's why:
... geez by this time you've almost got GNU/Linux again on Sun hardware. AIX 5L has at least started to reverse the trend -- you can get most of the GNU tools pre-installed. (Yes, the native compiler on Solaris and AIX produces much faster code than gcc. Most of my apps don't need the speed, they need the portability. I can optimize at the higher layers and get the speed I need.)
1) Linux is pretty darn good. It would take some *unusually* serious needs before you *have* to look outside the Linux camp to find a workable solution. Linux has XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS, really good support for reliable and fast high-end SCSI, SMP, Beowulf'ing, and a huge community to provide free-as-in-beer help.
2) On a per-processor basis, Linux-on-Intel/PowerPC is faster than Solaris-on-anything hands down. (This will probably change after the next generation of Sparc chips comes out.)
3) Solaris tends to be a pain to port code to. Much like AIX, it's got the AT&T-derived libraries and proprietary crud that doesn't function with as much polish as the GNU stuff. So you end up installing a huge set of GNU tools and libraries on Solaris and
I see plenty of places where *today* Solaris has a great role, but I don't see much in the future. And Sun hardware is nice, but certainly not extraordinarily better than IBM hardware.
This just seems like "too little too late". (Of course, this leads right into the critical question: is there *anything* Sun can do that would be worth paying for?)
Comments?
If SUN ever makes Solaris Open-Source, and IF Linux is allowed to plunder the better parts of it (more multiprocessing capability, 'zones' etc) then Linux will be the OS of the future, much more so than it is today.
Some of the things that keeps Linux out of top-end shops are the reasons stated above. Sure, clustering is an alternative, but sometimes you *NEED* a big mainframe switching among thousands of processes. Linux has a difficult time of mega-multiprocessing now; but once the Solaris code is assimilated (or hijacked) it too will do one more thing Solaris is known for.
All of this just makes Linux better. Which just makes it tougher for Microsoft. Especially in the big-iron shops.
But the thing I wonder is-- is this what SUN wanted to gain from this?
Unfortuantely, the tale turned sour when Sun downsized and the entire team that did all this wonderful work (and probably will have saved Sun money in the long run) got laid-off.
So, this story is both good and bad news. They've done smart things before in the OSS realm, but they've also laid off some of the people that really made it happen.
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