OpenSolaris

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OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around the Solaris Operating System technology. The project is aimed at developers, system administrators, and users who want to develop and improve operating systems. Over 12,000 community members are registered on [OpenSolaris.org], of whom over 11,000 are not Sun employees. An active [OpenSolaris User Group community] is now growing worldwide, and dozens of OpenSolaris technology communities and projects are being formed on opensolaris.org.

Contents

1 History
2 License
3 Criticism
4 OpenSolaris Distributions
5 External links

History

Planning for OpenSolaris started in early 2004. A multi-disciplinary team was formed to consider all aspects of the project: licensing, business models, governance, co-development procedures, source code analysis, source code management, tools, marketing, website application design, and community development. A pilot program was formed in September of 2004 with 18 non-Sun community members and ran for 9 months growing to 145 external participants.

The opening of the Solaris source code has been an incremental process. The first portion of the Solaris codebase to be open sourced was the Solaris Dynamic Tracing Toolkit (commonly known as DTrace), a tracing tool for administrators and developers that aids in tuning a system for optimum performance and utilisation. DTrace was released on January 25, 2005. At that time Sun also released the first phase of the opensolaris.org web site, announced that the OpenSolaris code base would be released under the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), and announced the intention to form a Community Advisory Board (CAB). The Opening Day launch, in which the bulk of the Solaris system code was released, occurred on June 14, 2005. There remains some system code that is not open sourced and is only available as binary files. The OpenSolaris source code represents the code in the most recent development build of Solaris.

The five CAB members were announced on April 4, 2005: two were elected by the pilot community, two were appointed by Sun, and one was appointed from the broader open source community by Sun. The 2005/2006 OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board members were Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Rich Teer, Casper Dik, and Simon Phipps. On February 10, 2006 Sun signed [the OpenSolaris Charter], turning the OpenSolaris community into an independent group under the leadership of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) [link]. The former CAB became the first OGB, with the task of creating and confirming the governance of the OpenSolaris Community no later than June 30, 2006. The work of creating the governance document or "Constitution" is now in progress, led by a Governance Working Group comprising the OGB and three invited members, Stephen Hahn and Keith Wesolowski (developers in Sun's Solaris organization) and Ben Rockwood (a prominent OpenSolaris community member).

License

Sun has released most of the Solaris source code under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 1.1. Like the MPL, the CDDL is incompatible with the popular GNU General Public License, but it is an open source and free software license. The CDDL was approved as an open source license by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in January 2005 and is a "free software license" according to the FSF's definition (see [here]).

It should be noted that, just as with the MPL, the FSF also states: "... So, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason." [link]

The Mozilla Application Suite and Mozilla Firefox have changed their license to a tri-license: you can choose between the MPL, LGPL and GPL.

Criticism

Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, commented on OpenSolaris in December 2004,[link] by saying: Nobody wants to play with a crippled version [of Solaris]. I, obviously, do believe that they'll have a hard time getting much of a community built up. He also pointed out that the problem of device driver support would obviously plague the attempt. In an interview with CNET news.com, he stated that If you thought Linux had issues with driver availability for some things, let's see you try Solaris/x86.

Torvalds has since softened his position, commenting in February 2005 at the Enterprise Linux Summit [link] that the project's licensing terms were promising: …CDDL is different. Everything is in place for it to work well, adding (tongue-in-cheek) A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die.

OpenSolaris Distributions

SchilliX, a live CD
Belenix, a live CD [link]
marTux, a live CD/DVD [link] (first distribution for sparc)
Nexenta, a Debian-based distribution combining GNU software and Solaris' SunOS kernel
Polaris, a PowerPC port [link]

[Portaris], a non-official port of Gentoo's Portage to OpenSolaris, in beta as of April 2006.

External links

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