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Thursday August 05, 2004

Use the Source, Luke...(it's open)

Psst! Have you heard that the Solaris source code will be opened to the community? Yes, it's true and this was a topic of discussion at a recent OSCON.

There's enormous momentum within Sun to open up the Solaris source code and embrace the open source community. I'm a member of the OpenSolaris council (also known by it's internal codename "tonic") and I can tell you,the timescales are aggressive!

One of our blog readers, Yusuf Goolamabbas, emailed me with a great idea...how about having publically accessible build machines for OpenSolaris? We think this exactly what we need to do. I forwarded his proposal to the OpenSource council and so far, it's been well received. Hopefully, we will have Solaris 10 servers with secure "developer zones" where you can login, take a child of the source and start strutting your funky stuff! Watch this space - and don't forget to join the OpenSolaris developer community when it's launched. I believe a web site for this is in the pipeline already.

Of course, there may be some skeptics out there. How will we make money by doing this? Why will the community want to participate? Well, the answer is simply that the passion within the engineering community at Sun for both Solaris and the open source community is enormous, a fact that has been largely opaque to the outside world so far. Furthermore, the technology we've got in Solaris now is just too good not to share!

We will open our source. Will you open your mind?

(2004-08-05 04:56:41.0) Permalink Comments [6]

Comments:

Gee, open build servers? You really need to checkout your active Solaris community at blastwave.org where we have had open build servers for two years now. We have released over 700 software packages built on multiple build servers within the blastwave network. I have Solaris 8 and 9 and 10 servers and we just released GCC 3.4.1 built native. Heck, I even have a Solaris 2.5.1 for x86 server in place. Open build servers for the Solaris Community? I am way ahead of you and we have them already. Just as soon as Solaris 10 goes open I will have a server farm in place for the seventy developers at blastwave.org already. Nice idea, I like it so much that I thought we should do it. And we did.

Posted by Dennis Clarke on August 05, 2004 at 08:18 PM BST #

Hehe! The point was not that the build server idea itself was unique but more to illustrate the commitment to the OpenSolaris initiative by making it as easy as possible for people to participate in OpenSolaris development. It's not the server - it's what's on it! I hope to see OpenSolaris build environments on our blastwave friends' servers too, of course!

Posted by Jimmo on August 05, 2004 at 10:01 PM BST #

I applaud this effort by Sun. I hope that much is gained in the community by opening up the source to a great UNIX environment.

Posted by John Martinez on August 05, 2004 at 10:29 PM BST #

Oh I think that one must have both ideas up and running in concrete form; both the Open Solaris and the Open Community sites must exist. At the moment I have an Open Community site with a _lot_ of open source software happening. The really wonderful things that can be done with Open Source Solaris inside blastwave will be interesting to watch. One of my crazy ideas is to see Solaris running on a Mac G5! And why not? If people can run Linux on that architecture then I think that Solaris could run there even better. After all, 64-bit Solaris is now a decade old. Dennis

Posted by Dennis Clarke on August 05, 2004 at 10:29 PM BST #

<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type"> <title></title> </head> <body> Dennis ...

You and your guys have done a great job with Blastwave. No question. In fact, when the Solaris kernel team was at <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris/20040730">O'Reilly OSCON last week, several Solaris engineers were talking about Blastwave in their <a href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2004/view/e_sess/5804"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOF</span>. And yes, you have been ahead of us in many respects. We are considering all ideas on how best to implement the open source Solaris project for not only individual developers but also our customers, partners, ISVs, and IHVs. We absolutely welcome and value your input. One of the interesting things going on here is that the Sun executives have enabled us to communicate with the community as we put all this together, so we can involve you guys and have every intention of doing so. Let's talk, my friend.

Jim
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Posted by Jim Grisanzio, Community Manager, Open Source Solaris on August 06, 2004 at 03:38 AM BST #

We will always be talking and always growing together in many ways. I am learning that I need to read what I write before I post. That first comment really sounds wrong when I meant it as an entirely positive bit of feedback. Actions speak loader than words and I think that a web post fails to capture the animation of my facial expressions and hand talking! That would have helped a lot. In the mean while the Open Source Solaris steam roller will drive a flurry of activity at my end of things. I foresee Open Source software on Open Source Linux running within an Open Source Solaris Zone! That's a lot of Open Sorcery! Oh it is nice to live in such interesting times.

Posted by Dennis Clarke on August 06, 2004 at 05:15 AM BST #