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Sun Opens OpenSolaris.Org
An anonymous reader writes "Sun has launched the first version of opensolaris.org, featuring a small initial drop of source code. The idea is to make a display of good faith to the Solaris community while the rest of the source code due diligence is completed. The source code for Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is available for download under the terms of the newly OSI-approved CDDL license."
Sun really seems to like the Open-.org naming convention. They are probably trying to oppose Steve Jobs' iNaming.
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
Shocking, I tell you.
Take it easy? I'll take it anyway I can get it . . .
What a lot of Slashdotters might not realize is that Sun has spent literally millions of hours over the last couple of years "unencumbering" Solaris from patented code that was owned by other companies opposed to the open sourcing of their intellectual property. They did this for no reason other than to prove to the open source community that they are serious about open sourcing Solaris, and hopefully to sell some good Sun iron in the process.
It would be nice to see some Slashdotters give Sun their well deserved props for a change, instead of ripping on them.
"What? You gave us OpenOffice? That's not good enough..." I hoping this thread doesn't turn into another Sun bash fest because this time they deserve a little respect for giving away what I see as the crown jewels of their company.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
I don't read replies by ACs.
Merging solaris code into the linux kernel is a lot more difficult then implementing the feature from scratch. This is largely due to the codebases being wildly different but other difficulties contribute to the problem.
On the bright side, hot swappable processors, memory and pci cards are already in linux. enjoy!
Part of this release is the opening of more than 1,600 patents to the open source community.
:)
link
IBM just got outdone on their 500 patent release. Let's see them come back with 5,000! Come on, it can be a Sun/IBM "who can give away the most patents to open source" war
Finkployd
From it, I shamelessly lifted the following brief synopsis:
Q. What is DTrace?
Q. What are the benefits of DTrace?
Q. What are the key highlights of DTrace?
Q. What is the performance overhead of DTrace?
Q. How does Sun's DTrace compare with competitive offerings?
Q. Can DTrace be used without knowing the D language?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Check the machine itself. It says:
Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1
Bryan Cantrill, one of the DTrace developers wrote this blog entry as a general introduction to the source code layout and also to DTrace. This post by Adam Leventhal goes into some more detail.
82678 lines of C were made public. No registration, no click through license before download. The OpenSolaris FAQ is pretty good btw, and there's also a roadmap page.
According to this blog (the entry dated 15:43), those in the pilot program (more than 100 developers out side of Sun) have today gotten access to the entire Solaris source base, and have already built their own version - screen shot.
Basicly, I think of it as the Ultimate Packet Sniffer command line tool, being applied to processes and your system as a whole, along with a scripting language for your pleasure.
It lets you track/compare/analyze users and processes in real-time to basicly tell you what your computer is really doing and lets you pinpoint who/why it is doing it, system wide, without configuration changes or restarts..
Look forward to a lot of REALLY powerful scripts coming from this(there is an experimental rootkit coming out even, that used dtrace to sniff out passwords in system memory, etc). Very powerful, very dangerous.
You can (and infact Sun does) compile Solaris with gcc. Our production AMD64 kernel and a large number of the AMD64 libraries are compiled with gcc . However the makefile assume the Sun C compiler but the build environment has a wrapper around gcc to make it look like the Sun compiler.
They can be enforced against GPL software including the Linux kernel.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Sun's been using the term "Open" in their stuff forever. Remember, Sun's X environment was called "OpenWindows", and even though they've since discontinued the old OpenWindows window manager, their X server still resides in "/usr/openwin".
Though Sun's definition of "Open" has traditionally been "open standards", as opposed to the F/OSS definition which I believe to be "open implementations".
Actually, one thing I really like about Solaris is a forwards-compatable interface for kernel modules (i.e. drivers and such). This is something that Linux feels downright embarassing at (heck, they're not even compatable from one build to another, yet alone a point version), and I'm really not sure how FreeBSD is at this (havn't checked).
I can take a device driver written for Solaris version X, and chances are pretty good that it "will just work" on Solaris X+1 and maybe even X+2. (heck, I've even seen a single device driver module "supported" on multiple versions by a HW vendor) The only real requirement is that the module be built for the same architecture as the kernel (i.e. a 32-bit module won't work on a 64-bit kernel, and vice versa).
Bruce
Bruce Perens.