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Open Solaris Community Advisory Board Announced

Posted by timothy on from the should-pass-a-law-or-at-least-form-a-committee dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sun have announced the OpenSolaris community advisory board, chaired by Roy Felding (co founder and director of the Apache Foundatation), two community appointed people, Rich Teer and Al Hooper (both members of the infamous gang of six that helped to get Sun to restart Solaris x86) and two sun employees - well known open source evangelist Simon Phipps and kernel engineer Casper Dik. No date for the code release as of yet, but it can't be far off now."

8 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Solaris? Not again. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    If George Clooney starts dropping his pants at the meetings, I'm never going again.

  2. solaris 10 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I got fed up with Red Hat licensing... and made my way over to a free Solaris 10 binary. Gotta love it... now that they've got an insurance policy with OpenSolaris, I'm on my way back. Blow the politics, I want performance (and dTrace with Zones!!).

    1. Re:solaris 10 by SunFan · · Score: 4, Interesting


      Solaris 10 is really a huge leap. DTrace is useful right out of the box, no configuration needed, and there are lots of sample scripts in /usr/demo and appearing on websites. In practically no time at all (some reading of the manual, plus literally minutes of programming) I had a hacked-together script (based on a demo script) and was able to get a measure of the syscalls consuming the most total time in a program (not just counts of syscalls but the count _times_ the average time spent in each call). If a person gets enough knowledge to examine lots of kernel data directly in real-time, the potential of DTrace is mind-blowing (the *stat tools aren't even close).

      --
      -- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
  3. Hopefully OpenSolaris can soon answer by HighOrbit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How soon before Sun identifies all the components of Solaris that will be "open source" versus the components that will remain proprietary because of third-party ownership? Right now I only see DTrace as "open" on their web-site. They also say "Expect to see buildable Solaris code here in Q2 2005." Does "buildable Solaris code" just mean a few tools or does it mean a complete working system with kernel and userland?

    No doubt, if they can get a basic (but otherwise bootable and working) open source Solaris out there, they community will be able to soon (say within a few years) replace the proprietary components.

    A few weeks ago I bought myself a sparc box (netra T1 AC200), and after some initial problems with install media, finally got solaris installed. So far I am favorably impressed.

    1. Re:Hopefully OpenSolaris can soon answer by WebMink · · Score: 2, Informative

      OpenSolaris will be a full, buildable system with as few components as possible (mainly drivers) available only as binary when it launches this quarter. The pilot program is already testing and building the code (Ben Rockwood, for example) and has started thinking laterally about new potential distributions like PPC.

  4. Sigh by 4of12 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Meanwhile, like another public figure, Sun Microsystems President Jon Schwartz says:
    "Economies and nations need intellectual property (IP) to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps."
    when all evidence is that developing nations need technology, education, capital as well as respect for a functional legal system. That would include know-how that is gotten by any means, including even using industrial espionage. Consider Samuel Slater "stealing" the intellectual property of British textile manufacturers to establish factories in America - he was applauded by some American Founding Fathers.

    The progress of science has been enabled by open publication of theories and experiments. This same openness allows the best ideas to flourish and for development of technology-based industry wherever conditions permit, including lesser developed nations. The entire concept of "intellectual property" is not just a brake on the efficient operation of the free market system, but also impedes the progress of science and technology as a whole, progress which has helped improve the lives of millions.

    Some resources are of limited supply and exhaustible; ideas are not such a resource.

    --
    "Provided by the management for your protection."
  5. Re:wtf happened to solaris for PPC by turgid · · Score: 3, Informative
    So now where is solaris for PPC.

    These guys seem to want to make it their business to do a port.

    --
    Stick Men
  6. Re:Sun's Idea by fintanr · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Actually this isn't the intention, its not, and never has been, about trying to get Linux developers to jump ship to OpenSolaris. There is a very large Solaris community out there already - they tend to be much more active on usenet and mail lists than on webforums, so people don't seem to see notice them as much.

    Innovation in OpenSolaris will drive innovation in Linux, BSD etc, and vice versa. The all round beneficary of all of this is the consumer, be they end users at home, or large datacenters.