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OpenSolaris One Year On
daria42 writes "In June of last year, Sun Microsystems open sourced its flagship operating system Solaris. This article asks the question, where is the OpenSolaris project after one year of operation? It contains views from Sun itself as well as insights from an external contributor to the code." From the article: "Sun is yet to release some aspects of Solaris as open source software, although that process is due for completion by the year's end. Meanwhile, non-Sun programmers have to date offered some 165 code contributions to the OpenSolaris project, said Eagleton. Of those, 70 have been accepted into the project's code base, while another 95 are still in the review process. To allay early community concerns that the process of getting external code contributions accepted was taking too long, Sun has a temporary buddy system whereby external contributors are partnered with Sun employees."
I want to know why these guys switched from Solaris to Linux when Solaris is now free?
Can anyone with first hand knowledge answer my question?
I used to work at Sun, and it's a company with a slow-moving internal culture. Pretty much any organisation that contains 30,000 people will necessarily not be zippy. The lack of speed says nothing about their intentions, though. For example, I've been talking to a number of Sun people over the past several months as they've been choosing a revision control system for OpenSolaris to use, and they've been keenly aware of the benefits of both doing things in an open manner and doing them carefully. They ended up choosing a wonderful revision control tool called Mercurial, but first they spent a few months evaluating the alternatives and, even better, writing up their evaluations and posting them in public. This is a very useful service to the open source community, as few people have time to evaluate tools in such depth, much less write in detail about why they did or not choose any of half a dozen alternatives.
Slashdot really needs a "Not Funny" or "Old" modifier for these kinds of comments
Sun and Apple both ship a proprietary OS based around an "open source" core. Sun's core is OpenSolaris, and Apple's is Darwin. Sun has done a far better job open sourcing their operating system.
Agreed.
I do a 3rd party hardware device driver for both MacOSX and OpenSolaris. To compare Apple's to Solaris' "open source" OS is quite interesting...
This merely reflects the interests of the individual companies. Sun wants to sell more servers to both Solaris and Linux users. They are competing in the server space, which is actually competitive right now, despite MS's illegal behaviors. Apple wants to sell desktops based upon the main differentiator they have, the OS. They are "competing" against MS in a space MS has completely dominated. Only by maintaining a complete vertical chain can they have any hope.
In short, OpenSolaris is a real open source project. Darwin is a sham, and would not survive without Apple.
Your point is taken, but I believe you overstate it. Both are "real" open source projects, regardless how long they would last without their champion companies. The fact that Apple releases different parts of the OS, under a different time schedule just reflects the markets the companies are in. Sun gains a lot from letting people mess with things before they come out. Server people want to know what is up beforehand and care about the details. The server market is who their customers are (regardless of who uses OpenSolaris). They will buy based upon reliability even more than speed. Apple, however, is in a market where dramatic surprises and gaining as much time as possible before MS copies them can make or break their numbers.
I think we should look to what both projects offer to see what is best from each and recognize the limitations of both projects. There is no point saying only one is "really open." It helps nothing and angers those who are working hard to interoperate with the community. You do better to praise what they offer, than to complain about what they don't.