Sun Execs Spill the Beans on Open Source Solaris

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems' new president and COO, and John Loiacono, the new general manager of Sun's software unit, are very excited about their new jobs and the new direction they are taking the company. So excited, in fact, that that they spilled the beans on Sun's plans to take its Solaris operating system open source when they held a press conference after their keynotes at the SunNetwork event in Shanghai, China this week.

Schwartz reportedly said that he didn't want to commit to a date for making Solaris open source, but emphatically stated that Sun would do so. While this may have come as something of a shock to newbies in the Unix market, Sun has offered companies and academic institutions access to Solaris source code before, most recently with the Foundation Source program for Solaris 8.

Sun tried to put the kibosh on that program in the summer of 2001, and then was forced by the outrage of the Solaris community to open it back up again. This was about the same time that Linux was really taking root in corporations and when Microsoft had launched its Shared Source initiative, also designed to give big companies and academics a peek inside the Windows source code.

Today, Foundation Source is closed, but Sun is still allowing some organizations to see Solaris source on a case-by-case basis. And even during the brief time is was available, open source Solaris was a "look-but-don't-touch" deal, only intended for research purposes.

What Sun is apparently contemplating is something more like the Java Community Process, which allows outside contributions but which also keeps control firmly in the hands of Sun. It is not entirely clear how open Sun can make Solaris. Bill Joy, the driving force behind the Berkeley Systems Design variant of Unix that spun out of the Bay area campus of the University of California with that same name, was also the driving force behind the initial Solaris operating systems. But heaven only knows what other technologies Sun has licensed to make the modern Solaris 9 and the future Solaris 10. Making Solaris open source like Linux could present intellectual property challenges, and hence this is why Sun will control how Solaris is copied and distributed even if it does allow outsiders to contribute to Solaris development.

Back at headquarters in Palo Alto, the Sun PR machine confirmed that Schwartz and Loiacono talked about open sourcing Solaris, but issued the following terse statement to try to step on the story: "Sun is committed to working with customers, partners and developers in the areas of open source and standards-based technology. At SunNetwork Shanghai, Jonathan Schwartz and John Loiacono discussed Sun's intentions to open source its enterprise-class Solaris Operating System. At this time, Sun is in the development phase of this project and is not discussing new information about potential timing, licensing models or other details."