A few notes on the OpenSolaris release

Sun has followed through on its promises, and placed the bulk of its Solaris source on OpenSolaris.org. Regardless of whether you intend to do anything with this code, or with Solaris in general, this release is a significant event. Observers have noted for years that Linux was likely to bring about the end of proprietary Unix systems. With the opening of Solaris, that prediction has come to pass. While some proprietary Unix offerings still exist, Solaris was the largest and most significant of them. With Solaris in the open, the proprietary Unix era is done.

OpenSolaris is not a small download. Anybody not already running Solaris will have to bootstrap themselves with a binary distribution. Then there's the core source tarball, compiler, and "closed binaries" packages. Throw in the BFU package to get the latest stuff: "BFU" is said to stand for "blindingly fast upgrade," but other interpretations of the acronym are certainly possible. Sun's site requires registration before it will allow you to download files; interestingly, however, it also makes torrents and a (no-registration) third-party site available.

Note that, if you simply want to wander around in the source code, it is not necessary to download the whole thing. Sun has provided a web-based source browser which makes digging through the code easy.

The "closed binary" package is said to be a temporary thing. It comes with a relatively reasonable "free beer" license, though it does require that you only run the binaries on an OpenSolaris system. The list of binary-only programs is somewhat strange: it includes od, patch, rdist, sed, ssh, telnet, and kernel drivers for hardware like the Intel e1000 network adaptor - stuff which, seemingly, should be free. The Sun compilers come with a rather more restrictive license; users are required to be "a participant of the OpenSolaris community," may not publish benchmark results, and cannot modify the "java technology" included with the software. Also:

So it is, perhaps, not surprising that even developers within Sun are interested in using free compilers with OpenSolaris. An effort to Build OpenSolaris with GCC is apparently well advanced, so the need for the proprietary Sun compilers should go away soon. Interesting, according to one developer, much of the pain of porting to gcc was caused by gcc's insistence on putting constant data into read-only memory. OpenSolaris, it seems, did a lot of writing to "constant" strings.

One of the more significant omissions from OpenSolaris currently is an X server. Two servers actually run on Solaris: X.org and the venerable Xsun server. The plan is, apparently, to move toward releasing a version of the X.org server, but that has not happened yet.

Much has been said about Sun's choice of the CDDL as the license for the Solaris source code; there is not much to add at this time. It is worth noting, though, that if you choose to contribute code to OpenSolaris, you not only have to contribute it under the CDDL, but you must sign Sun's contributor agreement [PDF] as well. That agreement has some obvious things, like patent licensing. It also, however, requires you to give Sun an ownership stake in your code:

Sun, in other words, can take your code and make it into a proprietary product, or release it under any other license that it sees fit. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Sun that terms like this might reduce the size of the "vibrant developer community" that it wishes to create.

The CDDL license will prevent any code in the Solaris kernel from finding its way into Linux - we can only hope that nobody tries to sneak some in anyway. It is amusing to note, however, that the first OpenSolaris-inspired kernel patch has already been posted; it is a small optimization to how SYSV semaphores work. With luck, good ideas will flow from the OpenSolaris kernel to Linux (and vice versa), even if the code itself cannot.

Large dumps of corporate code are always a little hard for the community to digest. So it may be some time before OpenSolaris grows into a true free software project with active user and developer communities. It will probably get there: the code is good enough, and there are enough established Solaris users now, to give OpenSolaris some momentum. Whether OpenSolaris can develop into a truly successful project over the long term remains to be seen, however. There is some good stuff there, but it may turn out to be too little, too late from a company which is still struggling to understand what free software is about.

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