Lovely Article --thanks to Sun PR team!
LKR
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Hi all:
Yesterday Chris Ratcliffe and Stephen Harpster met with Timothy
Prickett-Morgan of IT Jungle on the record, to discuss the OpenSolaris
one-year anniversary.
Below please find the neutral to positive story as a result of the
conversation that highlights the last year in review and what it means
for the
future of the Solaris OS. TPM may or may not be surprised when he finds
out that we have reached 5 million registered licenses when he gets the
announcement under embargo tomorrow. He'll be meeting with Chris and
Josh Berkus for a pre-briefing tomorrow.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Liza
OpenSolaris: One Year Down, Participation Up
IT Jungle
June 15, 2006
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug061506-story01.html
The OpenSolaris project that Sun Microsystems created to foster a
development community around its Solaris variant of the Unix operating
system is celebrating its first birthday this week--assuming you call a
birthday the day that source code was actually made available to developers
to play with. While the OpenSolaris project has come far in the past year,
but there is still work that needs to be done to allow more significant
participation in the project from techies outside of Sun itself.
Perhaps one of the largest obstacles that Sun has to overcome has nothing
to do with technology, but an understanding among IT professionals about
what OpenSolaris is and what it isn't. OpenSolaris is not a commercial
operating system that is meant to be deployed in the data centers and the
departments of the world, but rather a means for companies, academic
institutions, government agencies, and individuals to participate in the
creation of future Solaris releases and versions. It is also a vehicle by
which Sun hopes to extend Solaris from its existing Sparc and X64 platforms
to other platforms, such as the Polaris variant of Solaris that a
sub-project in the OpenSolaris community is spearheading to port Solaris to
IBM's and Freescale Semiconductor's variants of the Power and PowerPC
processors. OpenSolaris is a development community, just like the Fedora
community created by Red Hat and openSUSE community created by Novell.
There's a good reason why vendors want to create such communities, and
Chris Ratcliffe, director of marketing for Sun's Solaris software products,
explains. "The source code for Solaris has always been available, but you
had to pay for it or be part of an academic institution. The interesting
thing to me was that the people who had access to the source code would not
only report bugs, but they also usually also sent in a fix as well." No
operating system vendor in its right mind would walk away from that
proposition--unless they were more concerned with keeping control of the
code and wringing money from it. That didn't work for Solaris, and there
may come a day when it doesn't work for Microsoft's Windows. The Linux
model of open development and commercialized support provides all the
benefits of a proprietary operating system and opens up new possibilities.
Sun has to let go, of course, and that was not easy. It took a changing of
the executive guard at Sun to get this done, and even then, it still took
many years. But, having gone open source, Solaris development should speed
up. "Now, we're getting feedback a lot faster and a lot earlier in the
development cycle than we used to get," says Stephen Harpster, director of
open source software in the Solaris organization.
OpenSolaris is still a work in progress, however. Harpster says that Sun
has finally chosen a source code management system, called Mercurial, which
is in beta test and is delivering source code in read-only form right now.
Mercurial will be operational by the end of the year, and when it is, the
amount of contributions from the outside world will increase significantly,
he predicts. Right now, to make contributions, the 14,000 members of the
OpenSolaris community have to have a Sun engineer buddy who can review the
code on the other side of the Sun firewall and post it into the Sun code
management system. There are only 1,500 OpenSolaris community members
inside Sun, compared to 12,500 members outside of Sun. Which means there
are only so many patches and projects that can be pumped through the
OpenSolaris project. Once Mercurial is running, a lot more members of the
community will be able to put code through the scrubbers and help get it
added to the development release of the Unix platform. Perhaps most
importantly, Harpster says that Mercurial is a distributed code repository,
which will allow code to be spread around the world on different servers
and accessible to users coming from many networks, but will be managed
centrally.
As part of the birthday celebrations for OpenSolaris, Sun released a bunch
of statistics to describe the project. The project has over 39,300 postings
in its discussion groups and has distributed more than 33,000 instances of
OpenSolaris. (And just to be clear, OpenSolaris is not the same thing as
the freely distributed, but compiled, Solaris 10 operating system, which
has close to 5 million registered downloads in its 18 months of shipment.)
Ratcliffe says that Sun has no idea how many instances of OpenSolaris have
been distributed through peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent. To date,
the OpenSolaris community has reported 440 bugs in the future "Nevada"
Solaris release and have fixed 147 bugs. The community has donated 170
pieces of code and 100 of them have been accepted into the development
release so far. OpenSolaris also has 30 user groups worldwide, and 32
universities are using OpenSolaris in their curriculum (the target was 10
universities, by the way). Sun has also fostered 40 student evangelists to
talk up the virtues of Solaris at these universities, and hopes to have 100
by next year.
Solaris 10 is comprised of approximately 5 million lines of code, Harpster
estimates, and about 90 percent of it has been released as open source
through OpenSolaris. The remaining code is device drivers, which Harpster
says third party peripheral suppliers are sometimes reluctant to put out as
open source, and a smattering of third party code from companies that are
no longer in business.
###
Liza Curran
Sun Microsystems, Inc. | Global Communications
O:310.943.6865 | C: 310.237.8384
AIM: leesepr
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