By William Fellows
News that Sun Microsystems Inc is preparing to turn Solaris over to the open source development model has been greeted mostly with enthusiasm by the ISVs and IHVs we have heard from. Sun dipped its toe in open source waters when it made the Solaris binary freely available to academic and non commercial users last August (CI No 3,471). It claims to have shipped 75,000 copies. Sources say that well before this new initiative, Sun had evaluated an ‘Open Solaris’ strategy and considered there to be too many obstacles. Feedback we’ve received from Solaris shops suggests that Sun’s wariness of being labeled the evil empire by appearing to compete with Linux, should be tempered by the knowledge that open source technology swapping means that both operating systems will benefit. Moreover the open source model is sure to fill some of Solaris’ holes. As they observe, Solaris has the SMP spurs while Linux is a good, solid operating system for one or two processors. Apparently Sparc Linux does not run Solaris binaries very well: some run but the majority do not. Sparc Linux runs SunOS 4.x binaries very well, almost flawlessly, it’s claimed. Questions are being raised about Sun the future of Sun’s Solaris license model given the millions of dollars OEMs have had to fork out for source code access. Some Linux shops say Sun’s UltraPenguin Linux-on-Sparc is faster than Solaris Sparc and while there are 50 or so OEMs doing Linux on Intel, Linux on Sparc appears to be a new business opportunity. Industry watchers expect SOS to be unveiled by the time Solaris 8 appears next year.
