Solaris 10 to Launch on November 15

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The suspense is finally over. Sun Microsystems will finally launch its much-anticipated Solaris 10 Unix operating system for UltraSparc, Sparc64, and X86 platforms on November 15. Solaris 10 will probably go down in the history books as the most important Solaris announcement since Sun was founded, in 1982. It is undeniably the most important Unix release from Sun since Solaris 2 was launched, in 1991, and put the company into the SMP server market.

While Sun's software and server marketeers will focus on all of the new software gadgetry inside Solaris 10 (most of which we have previewed in this newsletter over the past year), Solaris 10 is more than just a revamp of an important enterprise operating system. Solaris 10 is the result of the rising power of a faction within Sun--that Solaris, not servers and workstations, and not Java, is the key strategic differentiator between Sun and its many competitors in the IT market. (As Larry Singer, Sun's chief competitive officer, recently quipped in an interview that previewed some of Sun's Solaris plans: "We only date our hardware, but we marry our operating systems.") Having done the hard work in changing Sun's own mind about the value of Solaris (which seems to have required a lot of top executives to depart the company), it will be interesting to see how many minds of IT buyers can be changed from Windows and Linux and toward the preservation and extension of Unix.

The Sun announcement is expected to be made as part of the company's quarterly Network Computing extravaganza (dubbed NC04Q4, in the Sun lingo) at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California. While Solaris 10 will be the star of this quarter's announcements, Sun is also expected to make server and workstation announcements. In addition to the commercial Solaris 10 operating system, which Sun is expected to charge for under traditional perpetual software licenses, Sun is expected to announce a new annual subscription model for commercial Solaris 10 that is akin to the way commercial Linux distributors sell support for the open source Linux platform, as well as Open Solaris, the open source implementation of Solaris that Sun will not charge for.

According to Singer, Open Solaris is aimed predominantly at the development community--composed of independent developers, coders at commercial companies, and programmers at independent software vendors that write applications and middleware for various platforms, including Solaris. While many ISVs and educational institutions can already get open source Solaris 9 as part of their development process, the difference in creating Open Solaris is political as much as it is practical. Singer says that Red Hat has been able to rally customers under the open source banner, even though Red Hat is, in his opinion, a proprietary implementation of Linux, and that Sun needs to rally customers in the same way. "If you are losing sales to Red Hat, that is a very good reason to open-source Solaris," he says. Open source is a big deal to those people and companies that really believe in it, and taking Solaris open-source gives Red Hat, Novell, IBM, and other open source zealots one less reason to not consider Solaris as an alternative to Linux. Moreover, it also puts Sun's Solaris in stark contrast to Microsoft's Windows and other closed-source operating systems, including IBM's AIX and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX.

Many people have speculated that Sun would keep a tight rein on Open Solaris, as Microsoft does with its Shared Source for Windows, and as Sun has done, to a lesser degree, with its prior open source versions of Solaris 8 and with the Java programming language and runtime environment. The latter is controlled through the Sun-dominated Java Community Process, which basically is a system whereby you can make changes to Java's internal source code, but Sun gets to decide if those changes are put into the official Java software. Singer says that Sun has fully licensed the Unix intellectual property within Solaris and, more important, that Sun's lawyers have cleared it to actually release that Solaris source code into the wild. And that is exactly what Sun apparently plans to do with Open Solaris. Singer says that the licensing terms for Open Solaris will not be based on the General Public License, but that the Sun licensing scheme will be similar, in that it will allow any Open Solaris enthusiast to grab the code and use it in a product or project and redistribute it. This openness is perhaps a bit more than many people (including myself) had expected. But the devil is always in the details, and until I see the terms of the licensing, I will reserve final judgment.

When asked if it would be possible for a third party to take Open Solaris and port it to IBM's Power processors or Intel's Itanium processors, Singer said that this is exactly the possibility that Sun was opening up by taking Solaris open-source. This is exactly what Sun does, for instance, with its Grid Engine grid computing middleware. Sun officially supports Solaris and Linux, but it open-sourced the code so that others could support AIX, HP-UX, and Windows as well. If you want Solaris on non-Sparc, non-X86 architectures, you can get it, but you may have to take part in a community to make it happen.

As we have written in prior stories, Solaris 10 will be the first Solaris operating system that supports 64-bit operations on both Sparc and X86 architectures (including Xeon-64 chips from Intel and Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices, but not including Intel's Itanium 2 chips). Sun has been previewing Solaris 10 features in its Software Express beta program since last summer, including a significantly improved TCP/IP stack, a performance and diagnostic tool called DTrace, and a new file system called ZFS. Solaris 10 will also include a new dynamic logical partitioning feature called N1 Grid Containers, which is a stupid name for a cool feature that Sun has sorely needed in order to compete against the virtualization technologies available on rival IBM and HP Unix platforms and on X86 servers running Windows and Linux.

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