President and COO of Sun Federal Bill Vass' Weblog

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Friday Oct 10, 2008

DoD Continues to Welcome Open Source

The DoD continues to be open about open source. The Defense Department’s Office of the Chief Information Officer is getting ready to put specifics behind the department’s move to widespread use and approval of open source software.

The days of the DoD placing open source and shareware and freeware in the same bucket, thankfully, appear to be over.

Those of you that follow Sun closely surely know about our open source pedigree. After all, the free and open source Solaris Operating System has the largest installed-base of any other commercial UNIX or Linux distribution. We have always believed that the benefits of open source are vast and, most importantly, measurable. Below is a great list of facts and figures about open source Solaris:

1. The free and open source Solaris Operating System has the largest installed-base of any other commercial UNIX or Linux distribution.
2. Solaris 10 has over 7,400 supported applications. There are more applications available on Solaris than any other open operating system. Even if you count just applications for x86 systems, that's 4,300 -- four times the number of apps as Red Hat 5.
3. Solaris is supported on 1,082 SPARC and x86 systems.
4. Systems vendors like Dell, IBM and Fujitsu Siemens chose to resell Solaris because of strong customer demand.
5. There have been more than 11.5 million Solaris downloads to date.
6. Solaris 10 downloads have consistently averaged in the multiple thousands per week for more than a year.
7. OpenSolaris has more than 160,000 registered community vendors. Behind Sun itself, Intel is now the second largest contributor to the OpenSolaris community.
8. Gartner rated Solaris a Strong Positive (the highest possible rating) in its recent Sun Vendor Rating.
9. Solaris 10 has set and re-set dozens of performance and price/performance world records on a wide range of benchmarks, covering a variety of workloads on x86 and SPARC systems of all sizes.
10. Publicly referenceable Solaris customers include BT, eBay and Qualcomm.
11. Solaris 10 has set more than 200 world records in price and price performance (149 UltraSPARC, 58 x64/x86). Check here for the details and stats: http://www.sun.com/solaris/benchmarks.

These challenging economic times, coupled with the need for multi-leveled security architectures, has created a perfect storm for open source implementations. The DoD’s upcoming memorandum is just one of my many actions that will increase the ability for open source to benefit both government IT administrators and American tax payers.

Posted at 02:44PM Oct 10, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[2] | Permalink

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Comments:

Regarding the last sentence in this post...the comment about this new memo being "just one of my many actions".

That statement seems to create the perception that Sun is assisting in writing the content for this memo ("my actions").

Having known, and talked with the author of the memo, Im fairly certain thats not the case.

But you seem to create the perception in this post that you are?

Posted by Joel Jackson on October 23, 2008 at 12:56 PM EDT #

Thanks so much for you comment Joel. I am glad that my blog is making the rounds. Of course, SunFed would not be so presumptive to claim to be responsible for the memo. We are merely very excited by it! The beauty of open source is that it provides an even playing field for all to compete. It allows procurers to purchase products based on their capabilities and not on integration costs or barriers to exit. Yes, Sun’s Solaris operating system has the largest installed base of ANY other commercial Linux or UNIX distribution. But, we really look at the DoD’s widespread use and approval of open source software as a win for the entire open source movement and, most importantly, the American taxpayers.

In fact, our very own SunFed chairman Scott McNealy, sent the below note to a handful of government CIOs last spring, encouraging them to continue in their acceptance of open source:

***********

"I trust all is well with you since our recent meeting in Washington. For the last several months, I have focused my discussions on why Sun shares it's intellectual property, the reasons to be open, and the benefits of open source technology - especially to the U.S. Federal Government. As I recall, this was an important subject during our meeting.

I've also talked about sharing and open in recent keynote addresses to federal, state and local government officials, universities and customers of all types. During these presentations I would describe the big benefits of open source and open standards (lower barrier to entry; increased interoperability; more R&D bang for the buck; more secure; and lower barrier to exit), and the feedback was positive all around.

However, the most frequent comment I heard in all of these meetings was: "We get it, but how do we get there? How do we move from closed, proprietary systems to an environment based on open standards and technology?"

While we were helping agencies understand the benefits of open, we were not providing a road map to help them start leveraging open technologies. That's why I am writing today.

To begin implementing an open source strategy, the first step Sun recommends is to draft an open source policy. Once an organization clearly defines what open source is, what it means, and how it can be procured and implemented, that organization will then be in a position to start realizing the benefits of open.

To assist organizations in drafting their own open source policies, we have documented some general, recommended guidelines. We included those guidelines in a succinct, comprehensive, two-page document that I want to share with you today. Please see the attached document.

This is clearly marked as a draft document, as our initial plan is to use this policy document to advance a much-needed discussion in our industry and our government. Moving to open source won't happen overnight, but we need to start taking real steps today.

You'll notice that we have not suggested that open source procurement be mandated, just considered. We would like to see government policies cease to discriminate against openness, and neither ignore nor neglect its many virtues.

We have invested more than $26 billion in R&D since our founding in 1982, and invest another $2 billion in R&D every year - and we are sharing much of that innovation through free and open source technologies. It is important for me and Sun to know that we are investing in innovation that helps you complete your mission. I would greatly appreciate your feedback on this issue, and stand by to answer any questions you may have.

Many thanks,

Scott"

********

Thanks again for your comments Joel. Maybe I'll see you at the DoD Open Technology Conference...I'm keynoting on Oct. 29 at the Ronald Reagan Building...Check it out http://www.afei.org/brochure/9a03/?evt_key=1b3a8f89-86fe-4c32-b2e3-b0710f0fc45e&Paying=Fees

Posted by Bill Vass on October 24, 2008 at 07:35 PM EDT #