Sun makes its move [LWN.net]

Sometimes it seems that Sun has been talking about releasing the Solaris code for years. Actually, Sun has been talking about releasing Solaris for years; see this LWN article from 1999 on the subject. On January 25, however, the company actually did something about it. The DTrace code from Solaris is available now, and the full Solaris kernel is set to become available sometime in the second quarter of 2005. There is, of course, a hype-filled press release celebrating the event.

The release appears to be real. A fully buildable system will be made available under Sun's recently OSI-approved Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Sun does not appear to be holding back any core components of the kernel. All of the Solaris 10 features they have been trumpeting - ZFS, DTrace, containers, etc. - will be included. It would seem that Sun is releasing a system that people might actually want to run.

The other half of the day's festivities was this announcement that Sun is releasing 1600 software patents for use with CDDL-licensed software:

By giving open source developers free access to Sun(TM) OpenSolaris related patents under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), the company is fostering open innovation and establishing a leadership role in the framework of a patent commons that will be recognized across the globe.

The announcement is rather short on details - things like which patents are being released, and under which terms. Nowhere does Sun say explicitly that only CDDL-licensed software will be licensed to use those patents, but the early indications are that the company does intend to limit things in that way. An attempt by LWN to get a clarification from Sun on this point was not successful.

Sun has repeatedly said that it hopes to build a wider development community around the OpenSolaris release. Once again, however, the details are yet to be filled in. There will apparently be a "community advisory board" with five members, three of whom will be directly chosen by Sun. There is no word on what the patch acceptance process will be. The OpenOffice.org process tends toward being bureaucratic and hard to approach; the OpenSolaris process seems likely to be similar.

Sun has tried to fend off claims that this release is a competitive response to Linux, but that is clearly what is going on. The company appears to be trying to set up a parallel free software ecosystem which, it hopes, will be more attractive than Linux. The components of this strategy are becoming clear.

For example, Sun has repeatedly gone out of its way to push the claim that Solaris is better than Linux - or anything else, for that matter. The various features of Solaris 10 were hyped yet again at the OpenSolaris teleconference; the company described them, with a straight face, as "rocket science." The message is clear: why bother with Linux, when the best is free too?

Then, Sun is stressing its free software credentials. At the teleconference, Sun executives claimed that the company had been doing open source for more than 24 years. Sun is now, they say, the number-one source of free code on the planet. Why bother with those other, johnny-come-lately companies when Sun has been doing this for so long? At the teleconference, the claim was made that HP and Dell have not contributed to Linux - which is clearly untrue.

There is also the indemnification issue, needless to say; indemnification was mentioned many times at the teleconference. The patent press release states:

Radically reducing risks associated with using and developing open source software, Sun is firmly standing behind our products and the worldwide development community. Armed with access to Solaris OS platform intellectual property, OpenSolaris developers and customers alike no longer need patent protection or indemnity from Sun's and other participants in the OpenSolaris community for use of Solaris-based technologies under the CDDL and OpenSolaris community process.

There is an obvious attempt here to position Solaris as a safer sort of free operating system - one with "radically reduced risks." It may be true that OpenSolaris users are less likely to be sued - by Sun itself, at least. The CDDL will also make suits by any other company which uses OpenSolaris unlikely. None of this will help against suits from litigation companies with no software business of their own, however.

Speaking of litigation companies, the SCO Group has not yet given its thoughts on the OpenSolaris announcement. Sun executives claimed at the teleconference that the company's Unix licenses allowed it to release the code with no need to consult further with SCO. We asked SCO if it agreed, but got no response.

The last piece of the puzzle is the CDDL, which serves to effectively isolate the Solaris and Linux kernels from each other. Solaris will live in its own world; any useful code it contains cannot be copied over to Linux, or to any of the BSD variants. You can play with Sun's nice toys, but you have to stay on Sun's turf.

All of this might just work. There are good things in OpenSolaris, and the code will soon be truly free. But it takes more than a code dump to create a development community. Whether Sun can create enough outside interest to inspire a wider group of developers to help out remains to be seen - as will Sun's ability to let go and let that community actually run with the code. Sun will not have gained much if the outside developers end up creating their own OpenSolaris fork.

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Sun makes its move

Posted Jan 27, 2005 8:03 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

Given that the CDDL and GPL are mutually incompatible, wouldn't the same issues be true for a Linux kernel developer working on OpenSolaris?

Mutual incompatibility.

Posted Jan 27, 2005 11:09 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

Yes.

IOW: if you ever worked in the linux kernel or in the GNU utilities, you risk contaminating OpenSolaris in the case you decide to move; if you ever worked in OpenSolaris, you risk contaminating the GPL'd guys.

Draw your own conclusions.

Mutual incompatibility.

Posted Jan 27, 2005 21:49 UTC (Thu) by rgoates (subscriber, #3280) [Link]

There are two kinds of contamination to consider. For the copyright kind to occur there would have to be copying of code from one system to the other. That should be easy to avoid. In the case of patent contamination, as I understand patent law (and IANAL), the history of the programmer only matters with respect to penalties that might apply. The question of whether or not there is "patent contamination" does not depend on what the programmer knows.

Mutual incompatibility.

Posted Jan 27, 2005 23:00 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I agree. The danger of accidentally contaminating is mythical. You can't accidentally copy computer code -- at least not enough to create more than trivial damages to the copyright owner. Copying a technique or general structure isn't enough to violate copyright.

Some people worry that code that wasn't copied might nonetheless be proven to a court's satisfaction to be copied if it accidentally is identical to the original and the author had access to the original. But again, it would take quite a coincidence for more than a few dollars' worth of original code to look identical to other code.

OpenSolaris Distros

Posted Jan 27, 2005 8:52 UTC (Thu) by miallen (guest, #10195) [Link]

The people who might be interested in playing with the sourcecode are developers of Linux and the BSD variants.

I don't think the actual source code is the one-and-only focus here. Consider taking stock OpenSolaris, installs rpm or apt, build packages for the usual stuff one would find on a Linux distro, fudge an autorun installer, and then master some bootable ISOs. From a user's prespective the end result could be very close to the Linux experience. Once that happends I think a considerable group of user's could appear as there are a lot of people who really like the whole download Something New, burn, and install ritual. Even though those users aren't messing around with kernel source code releasing OpenSolaris makes building a Linux style "distro" possible.

OpenSolaris Distros

Posted Jan 27, 2005 13:48 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

Indeed. Debian GNU/Solaris anyone, to add to Debian GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd and GNU/NetBSD? It's fair to say that the non-linux kernel options haven't been terribly popular, but they are there, and so is the necessary infrastructure within Debian to make this stuff relatively easy to do. The kernel is 'just another package', at least in principle.

OpenSolaris Distros

Posted Jan 29, 2005 2:31 UTC (Sat) by cajal (guest, #4167) [Link]

You'd lose a lot of abilities of Solaris 10 if you switched packaging systems. The Solaris package manager is zones-aware. If you just installed stock rpm or apt-get on it, you'd lose the integration.

If all you want is a nicer packaging system for Solaris, try pkg-get from Blastwave.org -- they already have many open-source packages ported to Solaris. pkg-get also gives you an apt-get-like system that works with the native Solaris package system.

Sun makes its move

Posted Jan 27, 2005 17:20 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I still suspect that Sun doesn't expect any outside development on OpenSolaris to happen. I think this is all essentially code escrow for Solaris users in case Sun's plans for Solaris aren't acceptable. They are essentially offering end users the advantages of a free system, with the expectation that the only advantages these users actually want is peace of mind and fewer licensing hassles.

GNU / OpenSolaris Distribution?

Posted Jan 27, 2005 7:00 UTC (Thu) by remijnj (subscriber, #5838) [Link]

Gentoo announced plans to create an OpenSolaris version of Gentoo in their weekly <A href="http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20050124-newsletter.xml">newsletter</A>.

That might be what you are looking for. I personally would like to check it out as well although i don't think that it is actually more stable.

I wonder what the code quality is like, i also wonder how many hours they put in to clean all the comments, especially the ones mentioning Linux ;-).

GNU / OpenSolaris Distribution?

Posted Jan 27, 2005 7:50 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

You already can download a lot of free software in Solaris package format from sunfreeware.com. The full GNOME is not among the packages but I've found nearly everything there that I needed for development.

Bye,NAR

GNU / OpenSolaris Distribution?

Posted Jan 29, 2005 2:40 UTC (Sat) by cajal (guest, #4167) [Link]

Sun already bundles bash and GNOME with Solaris, and you can get many open-source packages for it from Blastwave.org or SunFreeware.

In terms of using Solaris as a development platform, the major problem I've encountered is that many open-source apps don't easily compile with Forte.

The code bases won't really be isolated; IBM vs Sun patent standoff?

Posted Jan 27, 2005 6:22 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

If something useful is found in OpenSolaris that Sun hasn't patented it, after the usual LWN article in the kernel section explaining how it works, it can be implemented for Linux. Similarly, I'm sure that Sun developers have for some time taken notice of ideas coming from the Linux developers. The incompatible copyrights just mean that the code has to be re-implemented.

That leaves algorithms patented by Sun. If Sun wants to stick to a CDDL-only patent licensing approach, there's the issue that IBM's patent license does not apply to the CDDL, because it was not one of the OSI-approved licenses as of January 11, 2005 (see IBM's official patent pledge document, for Europeans, the 01/11/05 is to be interpreted American-style as MM/DD/YY). All IBM has to do to stick it to Sun is to decide not to change that date, until Sun reciprocates by granting patent licenses to at least GPL software. The result, then, is a standoff: Solaris risks infringement of IBM's patents, and IBM can hold off taking action against Sun as long as Sun doesn't take action against Linux.

Silent SCO

Posted Jan 28, 2005 16:16 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

the SCO Group has not yet given its thoughts on the OpenSolaris announcement. Sun executives claimed at the teleconference that the company's Unix licenses allowed it to release the code with no need to consult further with SCO. We asked SCO if it agreed, but got no response.

This is all the more curious in light of the fact that unlike Linux, parts of Solaris actually are directly derived from System V code! After all, this was the big change when going from SunOS 4.x (which was a version of BSD Unix) to Solaris 2.x (for example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS).

Maybe modern Solaris has been gradually rewritten to eliminate all original System V code, so Sun can open it. But I'm pretty sure this would have not prevented the SCO we have learned to know in the past year or two from claiming to control it anyway (after all, they loudly claimed to own code in Linux, which never was based on System V code). But now they really are strangely silent. No money left for new lawsuits?

Sun makes its move.

Posted Jan 31, 2005 21:26 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

So Sun is fighting fire with fire. Don't get distracted by the fire and
loose sight of the reason behind it.

Sun wants to stop IBM and HP from using Linux to eat Solaris market share.
They're opening the Solaris source because closed source Solaris can't
compete with Linux. Not because they want the open source community to
improve Solaris. If they just wanted to improve Solaris and give it
access to a larger code base and developer pool, they'd GPL or BSD it.
(They know what the GPL is since they used it for OpenOffice, and they've
known what BSD is from day 1.)

The whole point of coming up with a new license is so that Linux can't use
any of the Solaris code. They knew they had to get OSI approval because
their previous "community license" attempts at source-under-glass were so
resoundingly ignored (at least once the laughter had died down). They
_still_ want "source under glass", thus the incompatibility of this
license with any other license, especially the Linux license. This is as
close to what they really want as they could get away with.

The patent thing is also aimed at Linux. "Look, we have patents too, and
we can sue Linux with 'em any time we want!" Of course it's FUD, a little
bit of implied saber rattling they're _highly_ unlikely to follow through
on if they don't want to wind up somewhere between SCO and Unisys in the
eyes of the community, which includes not just their own customer base but
a largeish chunk of the Fortune 500 with patent portfolios of their own.
(The first rule of any Mutually Assured Destruction strategy is that he
who strikes first will be made an example of.)

Maybe their new open source initiative will help Solaris sell a few more
seats by allowing IT purchasing decision makers to tick off a check box.
And maybe it'll sponge up some open source coding manhours that would
otherwise have been spent working on Linux. But neither effect is
particularly interesting, or of much long-term significance.

MacOS X is based on "yet another BSD fork" Darwin, which is open source
and which a rapidly growing highly innovative multi-billion dollar company
is layering quite impressive proprietary code on top of. Hands up anybody
in the Linux world who loses any sleep over this. Sun can only DREAM of
Solaris becoming as relevant as MacOS X...

Sun makes its move

Posted Feb 7, 2005 2:33 UTC (Mon) by mgerdts (guest, #27726) [Link]

I'm somewhat disappointed with your coverage of this topic. I feel like the Linux advodate reading MS drivel back in LWN's first days. FWIW, I started using Linux as my primary desktop OS a couple years before LWN started. I have learned quite a bit from Jonanthan's descriptions of the bits and bytes of the kernel.

First of all, let's be clear. No one has ever stated that Sun is only releasing the kernel. While this would be interesting, it would not be of a lot of value without seeing how userland interacts. In fact, looking at the number of files in the code released so far (dtrace) we see that there are 4.6 times more files and twice as many lines of userland code than kernel code released. Does this mean that when Sun releases the source code that there will be an version of Korn shell that has an OSI approved license that I could "port" to Linux? Oh, how many hours I have wasted on stupid incompatibilities between ksh and pdksh. What's your favorite Solaris userland tool that is missing or doesn't work right on Linux?

I am rather confused when I hear from people in the "open source" world when they say that open source Solaris will be of no use unless Sun manages to attract a large developer community. As I see it Sun already has a pretty decent open source developer community. When I look at the times that I have felt the need to "scratch an itch", most of the time it has been with an open source product on Solaris. The same bugs or missing features would have caused me pain had they been running on Linux. Key examples of this include adding dynamic length strings to PHP, fixing bugs and creating a winbind UID/GID plug-in mechanism on Samba, and writing tools from the ground up to manage a large and ever changing user population. As I see it, either through bundling with Solaris or end-user add-ons, open source code that I wrote runs on Solaris and pretty much every Linux distro in use today.

Which parts of the GNU toolchain do not work on Solaris the day they are relesed for Linux? How about Apache's various sub-projects? Samba? PHP? MySQL? Postgres? What else do you use your Linux server for? I'll be the first to concede that Sun's desktop has been pretty bad for a while. However, Solaris 10 with JDS 3 and Xorg's X server has served me every bit as well as Red Hat's offerings.

Am I glad that Sun intends to open up the rest of their code? Hell yes. I have had other nagging problems in the past that I have sometimes been able to fix for myself because I had access to Solaris source code. I have filed bug reports and RFE's with Sun to get these changes integrated. Sometimes it has worked as fast as open source works ("MIT krb5 causes libc to leave ghost wtmpx files", libc patch released in less than 3 weeks) and other times it has taken years ("pfiles | head can leave a process in a stopped state" took from pre Solaris 7 days to Solaris 9 beta). I look forward to having a place where the sysadmin at a university that has warranty (or no) support can get his patches into the codebase that has typically catered more towards those with $50,000 - $3,000,000 servers and support contracts that make the hardware look cheap.

Will Sun see people flocking from BSD or Linux to Solaris just because Solaris code is now available? Probably not. However, there are plenty in Sun's installed base that will make good use of the code. Those in Sun's installed base that don't use the code most likely have lack of talent or corporate IP fears that would prevent them from doing much with the code that comes with their Red Hat or SuSE support contracts (which also make the hardware look cheap).

As for license compatibility: userland tools should be able to come across just fine. Binaries using the CDDL should have no problems running on the typical Linux distro. Thinking that source code could be lifted from Solaris and brought to Linux (or vice-versa) is probably asking a bit much from the technical standpoint, even before thinking about lawyers. Sure there are some routines that it would be handy to just cut and paste, but why should this licensing incompatibility be so much worse than the rest of them out there?

Please feel free to cut Sun a little slack as you go back and take a look at what they have done for the open source world.

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/02/03/sun.nfs...
http://www.openoffice.org/
...