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OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around the Solaris Operating System technology. The project is aimed at developers, system administrators, and users who want to develop and improve operating systems. Over 12,000 community members are registered on OpenSolaris.org, of whom over 11,000 are not Sun employees. An active OpenSolaris User Group community is now growing worldwide, and dozens of OpenSolaris technology communities and projects are being formed on opensolaris.org. OpenSolaris is derived from the Unix System V Release 4 codebase, though much of it has been modified since originally licensed by Sun for technical reasons. It is the only open source System V derivative available.
History Planning for OpenSolaris started in early 2004. A multi-disciplinary team was formed to consider all aspects of the project: licensing, business models, governance, co-development procedures, source code analysis, source code management, tools, marketing, website application design, and community development. A pilot program was formed in September of 2004 with 18 non-Sun community members and ran for 9 months growing to 145 external participants. The opening of the Solaris source code has been an incremental process. The first portion of the Solaris codebase to be open sourced was the Solaris Dynamic Tracing facility (commonly known as DTrace), a tracing tool for administrators and developers that aids in tuning a system for optimum performance and utilisation. DTrace was released on January 25, 2005. At that time Sun also released the first phase of the opensolaris.org web site, announced that the OpenSolaris code base would be released under the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), and announced the intention to form a Community Advisory Board (CAB). The Opening Day launch, in which the bulk of the Solaris system code was released, occurred on June 14, 2005. There remains some system code that is not open sourced and is only available as binary files. The OpenSolaris source code represents the code in the most recent development build of Solaris. The five CAB members were announced on April 4, 2005: two were elected by the pilot community, two were appointed by Sun, and one was appointed from the broader free software community by Sun. The 2005/2006 OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board members were Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Rich Teer, Casper Dik, and Simon Phipps. On February 10, 2006 Sun signed the OpenSolaris Charter, turning the OpenSolaris community into an independent group under the leadership of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) *. The former CAB became the first OGB, with the task of creating and confirming the governance of the OpenSolaris Community no later than June 30, 2006. The work of creating the governance document or "Constitution" is now in progress, led by a Governance Working Group comprising the OGB and three invited members, Stephen Hahn and Keith Wesolowski (developers in Sun's Solaris organization) and Ben Rockwood (a prominent OpenSolaris community member). License Sun has released most of the Solaris source code under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 1.1. The CDDL was approved as an open source license by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in January 2005 and is a "free software license" according to the FSF's definition (see here). Criticism There is a small number of people that still feel that the OpenSolaris "Community" is more of a Sun controlled corporate project than a true open source community process. This perspective is somewhat myopic because the engineering infrastructure and processes within Sun Microsystems are vast and considerable time is required to open source both the code and the processes. Simply throwing the source "over the wall" would result in almost certain failure. Thus a Community Advisory Board of elected members needed to be formed as well as governance policies. Numerous internal procedures needed to be changed. The OpenSolaris Operating System/Networking (ON) Consolidation and JDS (Java Desktop System) Consolidation together are an order of magnitude larger than Linux. Therefore considerable time and care is required to open source both the code and the procedures to a community based operation. OpenSolaris distributions Conferences Recently efforts were made to organize the first OpenSolaris conference. It's aimed at programmers or people interested in development issues and it's taking place February 2007 in Berlin, Germany. The OpenSolaris Developer Conference * is organized by the German Unix User Group (GUUG). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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