Friday July 30, 2004
Friday July 30, 2004
So here I am, a newly minted Vice President, trying to figure out what to do with this crazy thing called a blog. I mean, I've been developing and using software for 30 years now, but I'm by no means of the generation where blogs come naturally. So maybe you can tell me - what would you like to know about what we're doing at Sun, particularly in the operating systems space that I'm responsible for?
Perhaps starting out with a few words about me and my organization would help. I've been with Sun for 15 years, mostly in software engineering management and most of that in Sun's hardware division. I did a three year stint in marketing before joining the Solaris organization in November, 2001. Just this past June I was named Vice President of the Operating Platforms Group, responsible for operating systems at Sun - both Solaris and Linux. My team - and you know a lot of them - built all the cool stuff coming in Solaris 10. We're also the folks figuring out how to deliver open source Solaris, and I'm sure lots of you will want to know more about that. So, let me know what you think, and what you want to know. Don't be shy - drop me a line. And help me figure out this crazy thing.
Perhaps starting out with a few words about me and my organization would help. I've been with Sun for 15 years, mostly in software engineering management and most of that in Sun's hardware division. I did a three year stint in marketing before joining the Solaris organization in November, 2001. Just this past June I was named Vice President of the Operating Platforms Group, responsible for operating systems at Sun - both Solaris and Linux. My team - and you know a lot of them - built all the cool stuff coming in Solaris 10. We're also the folks figuring out how to deliver open source Solaris, and I'm sure lots of you will want to know more about that. So, let me know what you think, and what you want to know. Don't be shy - drop me a line. And help me figure out this crazy thing.
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As a shareholder, I do NOT want you to "open source" solaris in its entirety (ESPECIALLY DTrace!). I want you to keep the good stuff completely sun-only, accessible only under NDA.
As a (driver) developer, I want you to spend time documenting APIs. The REAL APIS that you guys actually use. EG: Nexus driver interface. Throwing a buncha code out there has some use... but having consistent, well-documented, predictably behaving public APIs is much, much more important.
Posted by Philip Brown on August 03, 2004 at 04:51 PM PDT #
Posted by Dennis Clarke on August 04, 2004 at 02:07 AM PDT #
Phil does echo some of our thoughts. Many in the Solaris Community are "Nervous" about open sourcing Solaris. Its a big move and it seems to us almost make-or-break for Sun. Certainly we want to be engaged, we want to see Solaris become the bright star, and we want to be able to pick up the areas where Solaris lacks, particularly in those places where Sun is not so interested in playing EG Device suport and OpenGL for x86. But not everyone is convinced that open source is the way to go. Yes Solaris needs a community collaboration model, but is open-source the right one?
To ease the nerves I think we need an education on just how Sun intends to manage this, how it intends to prevent features migrating to other OSes. How <U>does</u> Sun take the leading position and keep other OSes trailing behind. That's hard when all your competitors can read your sourcecode.
PS I Still haven't received my "There's Sun Inside" sticker :-) Bob
Posted by Robert Lunnon on August 04, 2004 at 05:27 AM PDT #
Posted by Adam Leventhal's Weblog on August 11, 2004 at 10:34 AM PDT #
Posted by Robert on August 17, 2004 at 11:46 AM PDT #
We're still working on the details for the compilers. We know to be successful that free compilers need to be available to the community for building open source Solaris. Our question back to you is, do those free compilers need to be the Sun Studio compilers? If so, do the compilers need to be open source as well, or just free? Or, would you prefer to use GCC?
Someone could build an OS based on Solaris open source and distribute it for free. We at Sun haven't determined yet what our licensing and/or support fees will be for the branded distribution called "Solaris."
Posted by Glenn Weinberg on August 17, 2004 at 12:28 PM PDT #
Posted by Robert Milkowski on August 18, 2004 at 09:28 AM PDT #
Posted by Robert Milkowski on August 18, 2004 at 09:29 AM PDT #
If Sun does choose to opensource Solaris, hopefully Sun can let Solaris community knows how you prepare for the possible cloning of solaris features in other operating systems, not only linux, but other proprietary OSes like AIX or HP/UX.
Solaris by far is the crown jewel of Sun, without appropriate protection, I am afraid Sun just gives out its core competitiveness. Publishing driver module API and closely cooperating with IHVs to produce drivers for "PC" hardwares are more important and urgent than opensourcing the whole Solaris code base, I would say.
For instance, though I am not sure if it is doable, since Sun W2100z/W1100z adopts nVIDIA Quadro chips, how about talking nVIDIA into producing XSun drivers for their whole product lineup, not just Quadro line? By doing this, softwares like JDS+Solaris will stand better chance to return (or enter) PC/Desktop Workstation segment.
Just my $0.02, thank you for listening. :)
Posted by Ivan Wang on September 03, 2004 at 06:56 AM PDT #
Posted by Ragu on September 11, 2004 at 09:41 PM PDT #
"This is a definte(sic) business model"
Okay, please explain, in detail, HOW "releasing Solaris under the GNU GPL", is going to increase sun revenues over what they are now.
Apparently, it's the new business model of the 00-ies...
Posted by Philip Brown on September 13, 2004 at 05:53 PM PDT #
yeah, I am always fancinated by this "opensource -> profit" reasoning. let's do a review on facts.
linux systems sold are 1) servers like those sold by IBM 2) workstations, actually PCs with powerful graphics/CPU to handle 3D animation/design 3) home-built PC loaded with various distributions of linux by their owners.
among these 3 types of systems, profit generated in 1) and 2) are mostly from the applications running on top of them, and service provided by system vendor, but not from the OS itself, be it opensource one or not, as long as the OS suffice the stability/performance requirement of applications, opensource OS here makes little point. Even if Windows XP is ok, as long as those must-have apps. run without problems. ;)
3) is more tricky to categorize, actually, these are not "system"s, the margin is distributed among hardware vendors, for an OS vendor, opensource seems not profitable to me. What's status of Mandrake, SuSE (oops, no more,) RedHat (do you call Fedora profitable? ;) Actually, the only vendor profits in this category is M$. which products are criticized often, it is still generating $$, however.
One must wonder how Linux achieve current acceptance. To keep in mind, linux achieve current status because of years of continuing dedication from developers, who did that not for profit. this is the advantage opensource provides, but definitely not profit for an organization.
And if an OS vendor wants to take this type of advantage, the first thing to do is wide range of *PC retail market* hardware support. Opensource developers (mostly students or hobbists) don't have luxury to buy an additional box, or to match a common platform to multiboot between OSes he loads.
This is my point of view, of course. Sorry for the somewhat long post. However, I just dont buy opensource->profit much..
Thank you :)
Ivan Wang.
Posted by Ivan Wang on September 16, 2004 at 09:21 PM PDT #