Will Sun’s Solaris go open source?
p2pnet.net News:- Sun Microsystems will take its Solaris operating system open source, say new president and coo Jonathan Schwartz and John Loiacono, the new gm of Sun’s software unit.
The news came at the SunNetwork event in Shanghai, China when, “Schwartz reportedly said he didn’t want to commit to a date for making Solaris open source, but emphatically stated that Sun would do so,” says a Computer Business Review story here, going on:
“While this may have come as something of a shock to newbies in the Unix market, Sun has offered companies and academic institutions access to Solaris source code before, most recently with the Foundation Source program for Solaris 8.”
Sun is apparently now contemplating something more like the Java Community Process, which allows outside contributions but which also keeps control firmly in the hands of Sun, says the story, but, “It is not entirely clear how open Sun can make Solaris.”
Sun issued a “terse” statement to try to step on the story, says Computer Business Review, adding the statement said:
“Sun is committed to working with customers, partners and developers in the areas of open source and standards-based technology. At SunNetwork Shanghai, Jonathan Schwartz and John Loiacono discussed Sun’s intentions to open source its enterprise-class Solaris Operating System. At this time, Sun is in the development phase of this project and is not discussing new information about potential timing, licensing models or other details.”
June 3rd, 2004 at 5:41 pm
if Java’s recent license is any indicator, then dont hold your breath, Sun is trying to play both sides and will fail miserably….
June 4th, 2004 at 1:04 pm
I imagine the Sun people are looking at different models for their product line. Knowing how popular Solaris is for some things, I imagine they might get a few bites if they did really open their sources. I think they are in the same boat Microsoft is in, where the community has become a bit less than sanguine over their tight control of the code base, and some folk feel the need for a bit of freedom in how they write applications for Solaris. Using some variant of the GPL or one they have specifically designed for Solaris makes more sense than having just their own code-smiths working on it. There exists a lot of talent out there in the world, and not all of them work for MS or Sun.