Sun to donate Cluster code to OpenSolaris community
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Sun will release its Solaris Cluster source code over the next 18 months to help developers build clustered and high-availability applications and services.
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Sun Microsystems will create an open-source project around its Solaris 10 operating system by the end of the year, company executives said Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Looking to steal thunder from the Linux juggernaut or at least catch the same wave, Sun plans to release binaries in Spring 2008 for its OpenSolaris Unix platform, similar to how Linux is offered, as part of the company's Project Indiana. Sun officials discussed the effort at a meeting in San Francisco on Thursday. The company wants to mimic the Linux distribution model as a way to grow the market for Solaris. "Over the last five or 10 years, orders of magnitude more people in the world know Linux environment than know Solaris. This is a problem," said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief OS strategist and a former CTO of the Linux Foundation. Having already offered up Solaris to open source via the OpenSolaris project, Sun will expand its proselytizing of the platform by releasing binaries. Project Indiana seeks to combine what Sun described as the best of Solaris -- its enterprise-class capabilities, innovation, and backward compatibility -- with the best of Linux -- its distribution model, community, and its being free and open source. "Even with open source, the binary platform is the key thing of value," said Murdock. Pre-releases of Project Indiana are expected to start this fall. Also featured as part of the project will be short release cycles that will offer something downloadable offered every six months. Developers will get the latest Solaris innovations without having to build the Solaris code. "The main goal of Indiana is to reorient Solaris around the distribution model," said Murdock. With the project, Sun is moving to a two-tier development environment in which enterprise customers can get the commercial version of Solaris and developers can access the Indiana binary version. Sun's Indiana project was called "a good step" by analyst Tom Kucharvy, senior vice president at Ovum. "By releasing Indiana as a binary, it has the potential of creating the foundation for a market for add-ons," which would be third-party extensions to the operating environment, Kucharvy said. With Indiana, Sun does not seek to slow down Linux but to increase exposure for Solaris in a big marketplace, Kucharvy said. "Well, I think itâs too late to significantly slow the momentum of Linux because it's just so established in so many markets," said Kucharvy. The Indiana variant will feature ease of installation, network-based package management, and Solaris's ZFS (Zettabyte File System) as the default file system. ZFS recaptures states of a system to assist in problem resolution. Murdock, who noted his number one charge is building developer mindshare for Solaris, stressed Solaris has the edge when it comes to support and compatibility. "There's very little compatibility between Linux distributions," he said. While there is competition between Solaris and Linux, it is in the same sense as how Red Hat competes with Debian, said Murdock. "Competition is a healthy thing in a free market," he said. Sun expects Indiana to be deployed in production environments and plans to sell support services for it. The idea, though, is that the Indiana release would be used for one or two releases and then the user would move to the enterprise product over time, said Marc Hamilton, Sun vice president of marketing for the Solaris group. Project Indiana grows the open-source platform, said Murdock. By making the project available, a large number of people can help make the product better, he said. It will serve as a test bed for future Solaris releases. Acknowledging concerns about potential fragmentation, Murdock said Solaris does not have the problem that Linux has had because anybody can call anything Linux. With Solaris, Indiana will be the reference implementation, and others would have to be compatible with it to call their version Solaris. Sun has done this with the Java brand in that multiple implementations must be compatible with the reference implementation, Murdock said. Processes for reviewing of Solaris, however, are moving from behind the Sun firewall to the community, he said. Also during the meeting, Hamilton said the company continues to see rapid adoption of Intel servers running Linux. Sun talked about Project Indiana during the JavaOne conference in San Francisco in May.
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InfoWorld - Sun on Monday will deliver its much anticipated Solaris 10, declaring the OS now free to download for commercial use, along with an aggressive services and support plan clearly devised to undercut Linux archrival Red Hat&#8217;s pricing.
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Tiny, sensor-driven devices exposed A brainchild of Sun Microsystems' research wing, the Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) platform code is now open to Java developers at large.â¦
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Sun signs up the software company to support its attempt to make useful a version of its Solaris operating system for x86 chips.
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Anyone who registers with Sun will be able to use Solaris for free on servers with x86 processors.
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The FreeBSD Foundation and Sun Microsystems are negotiating a new license to continue distribution of binaries for the Java runtime and the JDK, for use with the FreeBSD open source operating system, according to the foundation.
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Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW), as expected, has released the source code for its flagship Solaris 10 server operating system and also has moved the company's DTrace technology into the open source realm, along with a number of technology patents.
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ZFS file system can't be un-open-sourced, Schwartz says on his blog. And if Sun wins, it'll donate some proceeds to open-source and patent reform causes.
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion â helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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SAN JOSE, Calif.--When Sun Microsystems releases Solaris as open-source software, it plans to provide legal protection from patent-infringement suits to outsiders using or developing the operating system--one of several ways Sun hopes to make Solaris more
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Will Sun's $1 billion buyout of open source database vendor SQL drive down pricing on enterprise databases from IBM, Microsoft of Oracle?
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Ziff Davis - Sun's plans to offer Solaris code to the open-source community leaves some analysts scratching their heads.
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(InfoWorld) - A day after Linux creator Linus Torvalds publicly questioned the authenticity of Sun's interest in serving the open-source community, Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz invited Torvalds for a sit-down over dinner to discuss how Sun and the overseers of the Linux kernel can join forces. "I wanted you to hear this from me directly," Schwartz wrote in an entry on his blog. "We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities -- we have no intention of holding anything back or pulling patent nonsense. And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner." Schwartz was defending Sun against comments Torvalds made in a post Tuesday on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Torvalds suggested that Sun is keeping some of the more interesting features of its OpenSolaris open-source project -- such as ZFS, a file system in Sun's OpenSolaris Unix OS that is generating a lot of buzz -- close to the vest because the company doesn't want to help Linux, which has hurt Sun's position in the market. Schwartz begged to differ that Sun is punishing the Linux community for how commodity servers running the OS trumped Sun's Solaris-based hardware after the dot-com bust, a phenomenon that eventually led Sun to release Solaris as an open-source project. "Did the Linux community hurt Sun? No, not a bit. It was the companies that leveraged their work," Schwartz wrote. "I draw a very sharp distinction -- even if our competition is conveniently reckless. They like to paint the battle as Sun vs. the community, and it's not. Companies compete, communities simply fracture." Torvalds also took issue with the fact that Sun has not released OpenSolaris under the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License Version 2), which currently governs Linux. The license for OpenSolaris is the Community Development and Distribution License, which Sun created based on the Mozilla Public License. However, Schwartz is leaning toward supporting GPLv3 (GPLÂ Version 3), which should be released in its final version in the next few weeks as an option for OpenSolaris and other Sun open-source projects before GPLv2, which Torvalds prefers. In fact, the differences between GPLv2 and v3 have caused a public rift between Torvalds and other key members of the open-source community. "We love where the FSF's GPL3 is headed," Schwartz wrote. He cited a "variety of mechanical reasons" why it would be difficult to license OpenSolaris under GPLv2 and insisted it has "nothing to do with being afraid of the community. "Why does open sourcing take so long? Because we're starting from products that exist, in which a diversity of contributors and licensors/licensees have rights we have to negotiate," Schwartz wrote. "Indulge me when I say it's different than starting from scratch. I would love to go faster, and we are all doing everything under our control to accelerate progress.... It's also a delicate dance to manage this transition while growing a corporation." Torvalds in his post seemed unlikely to buy such an argument. "To Sun, a GPLv3-only release would actually let them look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation)," he wrote. As to whether Torvalds would accept Schwartz's offer, he joked in an e-mail Wednesday that while he does not get to the San Francisco Bay area very often, "free food is a big draw." Torvalds lives in Portland, Oregon. He also said that though his post was not strictly meant for Schwartz, he appreciates the executive's response, especially his assertion that Sun would not seek patent fees for ZFS, as some in the Linux community wanted to port the file system to Linux. Still, Torvalds' mistrust of Sun's motives in the open-source industry is deep-rooted, though he remains optimistic that Sun and the Linux community still can come together on common interests. "I'll just have to say that I still have the old Java licensing mess fresh in my memory, and I'll take a 'wait and see' attitude to what actually comes out of Sun," he wrote, saying he is the kind of person who "would rather be pleasantly surprised by people's (and companies') actions, than expect too much and be disappointed." Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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Sun Microsystems will integrate drivers for S2io&#39;s Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter into the Solaris operating system for Sparc, AMD Opteron, and Intel Xeon servers.
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At yesterday&#39;s official launch of the new Solaris 10 operating system in San Jose, Calif., Sun executives said Solaris will be issued next January under an &quot;open-source&quot; licensing plan similar to that used by the rival operating system Linux and the