The future of OpenSolaris

About seven months ago, in the year-end issue of e WEEK, I wrote a column about look- ing ahead at all the exciting
OpenSolaris was licensed so as to be
incompatible with the other major open-
source OS code base out there, Linux. As
a result, the contributors who were most
likely to take up the code that Sun had
released and do something interesting with
it were barred from adopting it.
Consequently, the great features that
first appeared in Solaris 10 wouldn’t reach
a broader audience until others reimple-
mented them under their OS of choice, as
with the DTrace-like SystemTap and the
ZFS-like Btrfs—two projects that Oracle
either leads or participates in.

developments the tech world had in store for us in 2010. I spent about half of that column writing about the anticipated effects of Oracle’s long-brewing acquisition of Sun Microsystems—in particular, what it might mean for Solaris and Linux, the open-source operating systems that Oracle would soon be distributing.

Back in 2005, Sun kicked off the Open-

Jason Brooks

Solaris project with the hope that a community would form around the Solaris code base in a way similar to the diverse and productive community clustered around Linux.

Today, the future of the OpenSolaris project is uncertain. Oracle can’t figure out what it wants out of OpenSolaris, and the OpenSolaris Governing Board is threatening to disband itself unless Oracle starts communicating with the project.

‘I WONDERED WHETHER ORACLE WOULD OPT TO RELEASE THE OPENSOLARIS CODE BASE UNDER THE LINUX-COMPATIBLE GPLV2.’

Complicating this vision were two significant barriers of Sun’s own choosing.

First, Sun waited way too long to release an official OpenSolaris reference distribution.

Rather than bless an official OpenSolaris, Sun wanted the community to come up with distributions on its own.

That left potential contributors with an easy choice about where to throw their support: to one of several well-established, vendor-backed Linux-based distributions, or to one of a few small, fledging OpenSolaris options.

In 2008, Sun moved to rectify the situ-
ation by releasing a proper OpenSolaris
distribution, but the larger barrier to com-
munity uptake of the code base remained:
It’s not clear that
OpenSolaris can sur-
vive without Oracle,
because—at least in
part for the reasons
I’ve mentioned—the
project doesn’t appear
to enjoy a community
strong enough to forge
ahead on its own.
Back in that year-end
column, I wondered whether Oracle would
opt to release the OpenSolaris code base
under the Linux-compatible GPLv2. That
move would, at the very least, give the
Linux community—of which Oracle is a
prominent member—the go-ahead to pick
over the bones of the code base to use
in Linux. At best, it would give the com-
munity the opportunity to combine Linux
and OpenSolaris into something new and
productive. ;