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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."
Combined with an Open Source/Forkable license, what more could a Solaris Geek want? Get out the party hats people, because this has got to be THE most awesome thing Sun has ever done!
(I'm excited, can you tell? *Happy Dance* *Happy Dance*)
Now for the bad news. Sun has taken the tack of encouraging users to build their own system. That is a good thing. Unfortuntely, all builds require a system to bootstrap the build. At the moment, the only option is Solaris Community Edition, a non-Torrented download. (Boo!) That being said, I don't think we'll have to wait too long for the OSS community to fix that little issue.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
now maybe we will see some driver development for all the cool hardware that is out there?
comment directly in my journal
Is zfs included?
Since I'm mostly unfamiliar with Solaris, what are the main advantages it has over Linux, BSD and Windows? Just curious.
Come on... seriously... what's more cuter than a Penguin or a Daemon?
A Sun with a smiley face?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If it runs on Xen, then it can run in parellel with Linux. That would be a good way for code to move one way or another.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm curious about how the SMF boot parallelization code stacks up against the InitNG project, which does the same for Linux. Anyone had experience with both?
Don't know about the rest.
When will the Sun compiler be released under the CDDL? Currently, Sun Studio is under a different license.
They aren't exactly parallel boot scripts. It's a part of something called the Service Management Facility. You write XML manifests describing how services should be started, stopped, restarted, refreshed, and what the SMF should do in the event of failure events. It intruduces the concept of dependencies between services, and makes a lot of things more coherent and logical. It also means you have to learn a lot of new stuff.
The SMF has a concept of milestones, which groups of scripts "belong" to. This is not unlike the principle of run levels, and when moving between milestones the SMF can fire off a whole bunch of services in parallel. It usually does this through scripts akin to the old init scripts, but doesn't have to.
That's not a very good description, but it might give someone who can't be bothered to RTFM some idea of one of the big new features.
Solaris 10 is great. IMHO there's no Unix (or clone) to touch it. That's just my opinion, and I CAN NOT be bothered to argue about it, so don't start!
SMF is going to be a head check for a lot of people who LIKE init.d/rc.d (though backward compatability with that has been retained so far). Myself, I like the fact that it's more robust and faster, and I don't like the fact that it's managed with a handful of different commands depending on what you want to do. And I'm not terribly thrilled that the backend is XML, but you'll have that.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
It may be. I know a very bright Microsoft zealot who thinks it is, and couldn't be more delighted at the prospect.
I don't think it is, myself. For one thing, the internal cultures of these two organizations, and the personalities they attract to senior positions, could not be more different. You just have to look at their past conduct to see this. Microsoft does lay traps, systematically, all the time. Sun is a corporate player too, thus in the game for profit, but its strategies are much more symbiotic in their essential character.
When Sun puts someone on a standards committee, it's to make the standard more valuable for everyone, on the express theory that it's better to share a growing market than have all of a stagnant one. When Microsoft puts someone on the same committee, it's to "embrace and extend" the standard so as to exclude competition, and the expressed goal is to eliminate all competition.
Another thing worth remembering is that an organization as big as Sun has substantial internal struggles from time to time. Such was the case with Solaris on X86. The project took off energetically at first, but it was a risky venture which happened to fall out of political favor just at the point when driver support was becoming most critical. The result was not a strategic withdrawl, it was a conspicuous fumble which cost Sun a lot of internal morale, hurt its reputation, and lost it a golden opportunity whose extent has only become more apparent in recent years.
So yes, it could all happen again, but not because of some nefarious strategy on the part of Sun Microsystems. Sun does not have a history of executing that way.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I won't be the only one, but I just thought I'd point out that the license they are using this time around is quite different, and they literally cannot take away your right to use the code once you've got it. You might read the (OSI-approved) license before spouting off, although I know that is asking a lot.
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing/
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
They are not as different as you think. I have worked at IBM and HP and have seen first-hand how Sun does things. Most of the traps that they have laid in the past have been in sales for other companies (IBM/HP being just 2 of many ).
As it is, McNeally's collaboration with MS makes me very edgy. Consider how much McNeally hates Gates and MS. It does not make sense for them to work together.
I have some friends who work for Sun and some others that work for MS (one who is on the linux tiger team - when he could talk that was interesting info ). One of my poker buddies is one of Sun's kernel guy. When I listen to him, then Sun is above board and simply competing. But every time we get into a discussion about Sun vs. the industry, he has been 100% wrong. Every time. Best example was the Solaris x86 release. Once Sun thought they were doing great, then they cut the project. But of course, a developer is not privy to sales and management choices.
One of the MS guys claims that this is a long term trap. In particular, both MS's and Sun's license allows the use of the patents in the files (not code) for the system use. If anybody "borrows" the code, then they are no longer protected. Both companies are supposedly hopeful that the Linux world will pick up from either (interestingly, MS no longer thinks that it will come from their stuff, so Shared source will probably die or be severely limited). I no longer code on Solaris just due to my not trusting Sun's motives. Sad, because like any Unix, I like it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Larry McVoy designed a prototype called 'NSE Lite' which was based on concepts developed by Eric Schmidt and Bunker Lampson which were incorporated into NSE which was built by a host of people including, but not limited to, Jon Fieber, Marty Honda, Ethan Adams, Terry Miller, David Hendricks, and Jill Foley. Larry McVoy had absolutely nothig to do with NSE or the core concepts of copy-modify-merge except for being an unhappy NSE customer. Glenn Skinner is listed as the patent author for 'smoosh' which is the central technology to both NSE-lite and Teamware. Larry claims that he is co-inventor. I don't know, I was in the NSE group, Larry was in the OS group at the time. Teamware itself was designed and implemented by Ethan Adams, Terry Miller, Jill Foley, Mark Sabiers, Lewie Knapp, Josh Sirota and Mitchell Nguyen. Larry's primary contribution was to complain a lot. Larry is a bright guy, but he didn't design Teamware anymore than Bill Joy designed Unix. He deserves a tremendous amount of credit for sucessfully productizing the technologies invented by the NSE team (and a lot of others) something that Sun, with substantially more resources, was unable to do, but it is an extreme stretch to call Larry the designer of Teamware (even though if Larry thinks so).
One of the MS guys claims that this is a long term trap. In particular, both MS's and Sun's license allows the use of the patents in the files (not code) for the system use. If anybody "borrows" the code, then they are no longer protected. Both companies are supposedly hopeful that the Linux world will pick up from either (interestingly, MS no longer thinks that it will come from their stuff, so Shared source will probably die or be severely limited). I no longer code on Solaris just due to my not trusting Sun's motives. Sad, because like any Unix, I like it.
Also incorrect. If someone "borrows" the code, as long as they comply with the terms of the CDDDL, they have the right to any patents that were granted by that license. Which in this case are any patents that SUN owns.