Advanced

Sun's Open Solaris Plans Face Problems

Posted by dave on · 2 comments
eWEEK Linux; By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Mail this story
Print this story

On Tuesday, Sun Microsystems Inc. will announce that it will be using its newly minted Common Development and Distribution License open-source license for its long-promised Open Solaris project. However, creating a developer community around such plans to open-source Solaris will not be easy—for many reasons—according to analysts and industry figures.

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: News Story; Groups: Community, Sun

» Get new stories by e-mail: nightly or as they are published

« Return to the newswire homepage

  Related stories
» More like this

Comments (2)

DTrace is a dynamic tracing framework for Solaris that provides an infrastructure to trace the operating system and user programs' behavior. Sun, however, will not be releasing the compilers and libraries needed to build a functional program from it.

If that is Sun's Open Source strategy, than Open Solaris will either wither on Sun's malnourished vine or it will be wrested from Sun's hands and developed into something that Sun never envisioned nor wanted. There is no such thing as a little Open Source, that is the same thing as a little pregnant.

Let's hope Sun gets it and that eWeek got their material mixed up. I don't think a "vibrant community" can be built around source that cannot be freely compiled into a working binary. Who wants to sign up as Sun's unpaid bugfixers?

Time will tell how Sun's strategy shapes itself, but the above quote doesn't paint a very bright picture...
I have wondered what the implications of Sun's License. Mozilla is licensed under the MPL, but it is also licensed under the GPL. This dual role is what helps it to grow. MySQL has both closed and open versions. But no one has done a performace check between either.

Solaris isn't going to have that dual license setup. Also a 'commnity' of a 100 developers sounds more like the employee's of Sun starting it up.

Post a comment

A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.

Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help

Sign up and post (it is free)  or  Log in and post