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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."
Obviously, it's because Solaris is one of many Linux-like operating systems.
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.