OpenSolaris: nice try, pity about the licence

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 26 May 2008 21:22

Opinion and Analysis

Why would anyone try to introduce an operating system into the existing glut unless it pays off in spades? What can a new entrant give us that the multitude of Linux distributions, the Mac OSX and old, hoary Windows hasn't?
Sun Microsystems apparently thinks it has a lot to offer - else the so-called Project Indiana would not have been set up to churn out "a binary distribution of an operating system built out of the OpenSolaris source code."

The OpenSolaris community was set up three years ago with the stated intention of being an open development group that would not be under Sun's control. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions and it is now abundantly clear that Sun is just using the moniker of "open source" for marketing reasons. One still has to go through a requester/sponsor arrangement to submit a patch to the OpenSolaris project.

(By contrast, the Ubuntu Linux distribution started by Canonical is now a little more than three-and-a-half years old - and there is no need to detail what it has achieved).

As Linux kernel guru Ted T'so commented, "Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community. Maybe it will be someday, as some Sun executives have claimed, but it’s definitely not a priority by Sun; if it was, it would have been done before now. And why not? After all, they are getting all of the marketing benefit of claiming that Solaris is 'just like Linux', without having to deal with any of the messy costs of working with an outside community. As a tactical measure, astroturfing is certainly a valid marketing trick. But after three years, the excuse of 'just you wait a little longer, we’re just trying to figure this open source community stuff out', is starting to wear a little thin."

According to the OpenSolaris website, "We are working hard to create a process which will allow anyone to contribute code to OpenSolaris while maintaining the highest possible quality standards." Three years later what is available is a draft which is long on process when it come to contributions - and short on product. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is relatively little buzz around the project. Lest we forget, work is going on to draft a constitution for OpenSolaris. Really.