Is Solaris rising in the Open Source horizon?

Sparking off a new paradigm shift in the enterprise operating system arena is Sun Solaris. Fueled by remarks at a press conference in Shanghai, Jonathan Schwartz, President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Sun Microsystems (Sun) remarked

"Make no mistake, we will open source Solaris," but don't want to say when that will happen"

Traditionally Sun has always supported the open source cause in terms of lending massive support to Linux and the open source community at large, in-fact, Sun offered its Sun Office application program free, making its position felt in the open source world.

However, Solaris stands out a frontline winner amongst the Unix clones, at the enterprise level, yet the imperative question remains 'What is the rationale behind Sun's move to go the open source way?

The obvious and immediate answer is entry and rapid deployments of Linux is forcing Sun adopt this new stand. Until Linux entered the OS scene, Sun had considerably enjoyed its position, but with the latest release of Linux kernel which promised to deliver and address Reliability Availability and Serviceability (RAS) issues, customers are now choosing Linux as a cheaper and cost-effective alternative, giving enough reasons for Solaris' move into open source.

Dating back into origins of open source, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1985, had brought about many changes in which software was being used, its main gospel being "Software Should Not Have Owners". Open source software is generally developed, not by single company but by a distributed, informal team of developers

It is noteworthy, that the primary difference between open source and proprietary software stems from differences in the treatment of the intellectual property contained in the software. Licenses governing open source software used are varied but, do share some features, they tend to diverge on the issue of whether a modified version of an open source program must be distributed under the same terms as the original.

By definition open source means, as stated by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is software, which has a license that:

• allows free re-distribution


• allows its source code to be freely and easily available


• allows modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software


• caters to the integrity of the author's source code


• must not discriminate against any person or group of persons or fields of endeavor


• does not restrict other software


• is technology neutral


• is not specific to a product


• allows distribution of license

Today, the number of individuals using or contributing to Open source software (OSS) has reached a sizeable level. A growing number of enterprises, and administrations, are using OSS.

With the open source model being a huge success early leads were taken by IBM, HP, Dell and Sun by encouraging it a major way in terms of funding open source projects or either by way of shipments of open source software in their boxes.

Yet with Sun's announcement of Solaris going the open source way has thrown open the enterprise OS market segment, making it quite interesting and challenging, besides Sun's Solaris, we have players like Windows Server, HP's UX11i , IBM's AIX5L and Linux battling out.

From a technical angle Sun is poised to enjoy greater benefits, to that of Linux due to the following reasons:

• Much stable high end and feature rich OS


• Solaris has an advantage of good support line up and through the company (Sun Micro) has a experience in handling huge system configurations & renders solutions.


• Sun's solution stack with hardware, Java framework and others would help to Solaris to freely align onto any platform

• Which version of Solaris going to be open source ? (desktop or enterprise ) and will it support all features ?

• If Solaris would be a open source, would it be a open standard as well?

Open sourcing Solaris is a strategically planned step taken by Sun. But this way will it be able to eat into Linux market pie, and deliver in terms of community contribution and whether the community developers will support and participate in the Solaris cause — are few eye raisers, which Solaris has to answer in the future days to come. What remains to be seen is if Solaris can stop the great Linux invasion!!