Sun Stays Open: A Closer Look at OpenSolaris 2009.06

With critics inevitably drawing conclusions over a more corporate and newly monetised version of Sun Microsystems emerging from the Oracle acquisition, the company used its 'day zero' Community One day at JavaOne 2009 to champion the cause of the open release of its flagship operating system OpenSolaris.

“We're looking for ideas that are unencumbered by Intellectual Property,” proclaimed Dave Douglas, senior VP of Sun's cloud computing division during the morning keynote. Whether he'll be allowed to say that next year is unclear at this time.

Making much of the deployment flexibility Sun claims is inherent in OpenSolaris, the company detailed its suitability for running on anything from a single core, right up through to a variety of multi-core environments. Or as the web site (and any number of spokespeople) will tell you; “From the desktop to the data centre.” ZDNet.co.uk has already reported on this story, but the word from show floor may add a little more colour to the picture.

As well as a re-architecture of its networking components with technology developed out Sun's 'Project Crossbow', the new OpenSolaris release will reportedly feature enterprise-level support that is said to put it on an equal footing with Solaris 10. There is also the addition of Sparc processor support, improved storage technology interfacing, virtualisation enhancements and “dozens” of enhancements for developers.

The new support options may be enough evidence for some to show that Sun is taking a step towards monetising various aspects of a product development strategy previously famous for being truly open at its core. Until now, support came in at different levels depending on factors such as turnaround time for bug fixes.

But I contend that it can reasonably be argued that this is not quite the corporate sell-out that some are accusing Sun of. Indeed, Solaris still sits as an enterprise-level OS while OpenSolaris is still aligned as a developer facing technology that benefits from exposure to the coal face of application build scenarios. Sun itself has stated that this is because essentially Solaris has, “Two different delivery vehicles.” Comparisons are being made to the relationship between Red Hat Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

As I have suggested earlier, OpenSolaris 2009.06 is still very much a developer-facing proposition and has been produced with a view to making it easier for software engineers to package applications and test builds. Sun itself provides a 'build environment' that allows developers to submit an 'application recipe' to the community so that a collective voice can vote on its worth to determine its worthiness for a full build.

Digging deeper than the corporate news announcement and attending some sessions on OpenSolaris today I also discovered that Sun has paid attention to modernising the operating system's web stack. This is to ensure that it is fully compliant with popular technologies like the Apache web server and even more basic building blocks like wireless capabilties.

Deeper still I found that less 'headline grabbing' technologies such as DTrace, Sun's dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating Environment, will now come to the fore. Although already in existence for half a decade, DTrace is said to “instrument” software applications dynamically. The instrumentation process (or examination and subsequent configuration management driven analysis of code structure if you prefer) once complete allows an application to be explored at its various different layers (if multi-threaded) so that bottlenecks can be identified and latency issues can be addressed. This can all be done live as the application runs and so is playing an higher role in OpenSolaris 2009.06 in terms of its associated developer tools.

Is Sun putting some new gloss on old technologies for fear of having to talk about Oracle in an up front manner in front of the press? No, that would be unfair. Solaris itself gets two updates a year and the open source facing end of its development has always been a crucial part of its evolution. The new product is new and could even be argued to a more grown up commercially aware iteration of its former self. Anyway, why should we be so negative about a company that many of us have respected for years trying to make some money if they do it sensibly?

Sun admits that the word 'open' may need some clarification though as we move forward. It's true that OpenSolaris is open, but most of the core development of the kernel is done by Sun – the second greatest contributor being Intel. Developers are far more likely to impact the development of interfaces even though the community base of users runs into hundreds of thousands.

Has Oracle made any impact on the development of OpenSolaris we asked in the press breakout session?

“We'll have to get back to you on that. There's something here in America that we call taking the fifth,” was the reply.

Sun reserves that right – and well they might. Will Larry turn up for tomorrow's keynote address? Who can say. Will he meet the press? Who can say. Check back with me tomorrow and I'll spill the Java beans.