Sam Varghese
Friday, 30 January 2009 04:57
Opinion and Analysis
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iTWire: Sun's other main open source effort in recent years is OpenSolaris. How is that going at the moment?
SP: OpenSolaris is actually going reasonably well. The way they look at OpenSolaris is to see it as a transition from the classic data centre Solaris to a Solaris of the Web 2.0 and afterwards. That transitional process is something that most of us thought would take maybe as much as five years to get through. I'd say that we're going reasonably well on that timeline. There's always things to be proud of and things to regret in any community activity, but taken as a meta-observation I'd say that we're going pretty much on track.
iTWire: Is OpenSolaris primarily for developers who want a graphical desktop or is it also for ordinary users?
SP: I'd say that OpenSolaris is aimed squarely at developers who want to have a graphical desktop. Those are the developers who, in the future, will produce the next generation of both client- and server-based OpenSolaris activities. That's not to say that that's what OpenSolaris will be about in three years' time. But where we are at the moment, I'd definitely say it's for web developers, and for the next generation of Unix developers.
iTWire: Basically tech-savvy people?
SP: Pretty much for tech-savvy people. Tech-savvy people - you know, the comment that I've made during the keynote here at LCA was that, well, I have a new laptop that I bought myself the other day, and I very much would like to have OpenSolaris on it, but I don't want it to be a hobby. I want it to be a computer. And even tech-savvy people want to have a computer that's a computer, and not a hobby.
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