OpenSolaris Code Released

njcoder writes "C|net's news.com.com has reported that Sun Microsystems is releasing parts of the OpenSolaris code today licensed under the OSI-approved CDDL . The release consistes of over 5 million lines of code for the base system OS/Net (kernel and networking). OpenSolaris is based on Solaris 10, the current version of Sun's Unix Operating System. Back in January, Sun released the code for DTrace, a dynamic tracing tool for analyzing and debugging kernel and userland events. DTrace is one of the big features in Solaris 10. Some other highlights include the GRUB bootloader, SMF (Service Management Facility) which replaces init.d scripts, it starts up processes in parallel for faster boots (7 second boot on a dual opteron workstation I think that was the setup) as well as providing features for automatically restarting. OpenSolaris provides support for x86/x86-64 processors as well as Sparc. The Blastware guys are working on Polaris which is an OpenSolaris port to PowerPC. Sun has been working on opening Solaris for over a year now. The OpenSolaris project started with a pilot group of Sun and non-Sun users. During the pilot program a lot of info including screenshots could be found on various OpenSolaris member blogs. (My favorite is Ben Rockwood's blog). Teamware is the source code management system Sun uses for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Which was designed by Larry McVoy (now of BitKeeper) while he was at sun. No word yet on if Teamware will be available for OpenSolaris developers or not. Sun also uses CollabNet for it's Open Source project websites so that might be a possibility as well."

Comments

openoffice...

[torrents]

if this project is half as successful for sun as openoffice is i'm sure they'll be happy they decided to open it...

Can either an "Editor" or the Poster please RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

"7 second boot on a dual opteron workstation I think that was the setup"

You don't have to think, just RTFA, where you can see that it was a single AMD64 setup.
Still, I guess that would be too much trouble for the simple gain of being correct ?

It is MS and Sun vs. Linux

[WindBourne]

MS moved to "Shared Source" sometime ago. It was done in hopes that Linux coders would borrow from MS. So far, it has not happened.

But this has potential to do what MS could not. Solaris is at least respected by the development world. This is simply another trap being laid by Sun and MS against Linux.

What is funny is how little ppl seem to remember from just 7 years ago. Sun actually ported to X86 once before AND "opened" their source code. Then when they thought that things were going well, they dropped it. If Sun ever feels like things are going in their favor, it is almost certain that they will do it again.

Re:Rock on!

[elmegil]

So, tell me exactly which features are in Linux/FreeBSD/etc that I don't have or can't get for Solaris? Assertion that my statement is not true doesn't prove a damn thing.

Does Solaris want to be the hacker's desktop OS? I really doubt it. Does Solaris want to be an OSS player in the data center? Absolutely. And for data center features, Solaris does very well against the competitors. If you think Sun's OSS strategy is to get joe hacker to run his OS, of course you're going to be disappointed, because you just don't get it yourself.