Get In On The Ground Floor

How Open Is OpenSolaris?

This question is hotly debated, but tonight at the SVOSUG (Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group meeting), participants were invited several times to join and contribute to a project that is still in the design phase: FMAC (Flexible Mandatory Access Control. A measure of how cool it is that this project is being developed in the open from the design phase is that the project is co-sponsored by one of the most secure organizations on the planet: the NSA (the U.S. National Security Agency).

John Weeks gave an overview of the current state of the design and current plans and invited everyone to visit the project web site and join the discussion. You don't have to contribute code; you can comment on the design, contribute a wish or requirement. Can you make a security policy easier to express? Can you help design a GUI? The project is being designed in the community, by the community.

Teaser: One exciting feature of the project is that you can change security policy on a running system; you do not have to bring the system down to modify the security policy. When a new policy is loaded, access decisions that have already been calculated are flushed and then recalculated at next access.

Coincidentally, the SVOSUG had a visitor tonight (Moriah Waterland) from the Caiman project (Solaris Install Revisited) - another project that has been in the open since the design phase.

And first, but not least, Alan DuBoff invited everyone to contribute to his OpenSolaris ON Build Cheatsheet. If you can install the Solaris OS, you should be able to build ON using this guide.

Posted at 11:01PM Mar 27, 2008 by alta in General  |  Comments[0]