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Our Blogs Open Sauce Open source: how Sun sees it
Our Blogs Open Sauce Open source: how Sun sees it | Open source: how Sun sees it |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 30 January 2009 | |
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Page 5 of 6 iTWire: So you think that there's scope for a whole new band of users who appreciate the strengths of OpenSolaris to come in, without poaching people from the Linux community? Featured Whitepaper
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SP: Absolutely. And that's demonstrably happening. There's very little flow that I'm seeing in any way demonstrated, either from the OpenSolaris community to some other operating system, or from some other operating system to the OpenSolaris community. The OpenSolaris community has got a lot of students in it. It has a lot of software developers from enterprises who are prototyping it, rather than deploying it. And I think what we're seeing here is a net growth in the open source community, rather than a migration around the open source community. iTWire: What future plans does Sun have vis-a-vis open source? What other projects do you see in the pipeline? SP: Well, we've got pretty much our entire portfolio in a state where it's open source now, and the one or two projects that aren't open source, like the composite application server, Java caps, are unlikely to go open source for licensing reasons. I think what we'll see now is a focus on community growth and on anchoring the product strategies around each of those open source communities. I'm not anticipating that we'll see substantial new open source projects coming from Sun in the near future. I think what we're now going to see is a focus on community consolidation. iTWire: There were initially some complaints when community members tried to contribute to the OpenSolaris code base - they said there was too much of bureaucracy. What steps have been taken to ease this because you say the community has grown to such an extent? SP: I think that was 2008-05.The difficulty that we had was that when Solaris was being developed inside Sun, it was being managed in a version control system that was proprietary. And one of the steps we had to take in making it open source was to move all of the source code into a publicly accessible open source version control system. So we moved all the code out, and into one called Mercurial. Moving a substantial code base to a version control system with a completely new architecture actually is a really big job. It wasn't complete at the stage that you're talking about. That is complete, I think for the vast majority of OpenSolaris now. So there's now publicly accessible version control systems where developers wanting to make commits can download the code and make commits back in. There's still a few places where that is a work in progress, but the vast majority of the areas in which people are interested in contributing to are now on the public version control system. CONTINUED |
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