HR Geek: (Product) Strategy for the Rest of Us

There's a very interesting post on ZDNet's Between the Lines (with the above title) about OpenSolaris 2008.05. A few highlights:

While very much community software and not yet at the level of polish for end-user adoption that many of the latest Linux distributions are now enjoying — shows promise and enormous potential as an enterprise-class UNIX desktop and server with an Ubuntu-like flavor.
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I’m very impressed with the OpenSolaris 2008.05 release — clearly, Ubuntu’s success has rubbed off on the OpenSolaris crowd, and thus it has adopted a lot of that Linux distribution’s look and feel. End-users for the most part should feel right at home with OpenSolaris, with its up-to-date GNOME 2.22 interface, the very same that powers Ubuntu Hardy Heron’s. The installation system boots as a Live CD, just like Ubuntu, and installs with only a few mouse clicks. Many new configuration applets and end-user programs have been added, making Solaris a much more “livable” environment than its big brother, Solaris 10.
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Beauty is not only skin-deep. OpenSolaris employs the very same enterprise-proven high-performance Solaris 10 kernel that powers the biggest and baddest Sun boxes, and has the stability and monolithic scalability to match, something that commodity Linux desktops and servers — while far more stable and sprightly than Windows OSes — lack in comparison.

I've used Ubuntu quite a bit so the comparisons both make some sense and please me. I'll admit to some serious skepticism about Project Indiana (the effort to shift OpenSolaris to a package-based environment), but it sounds like it's been pretty successful. I'll be interested to hear what others thing following CommunityOne and I'll be watching closely to see if it goes GPLv3 (wish I had insider knowledge on that one, but I don't).

OpenSolaris is the first and only System V-based UNIX to have been released into Open Source. However, it uses the CDDL license, a MPL-derivative which is incompatible with the GNU GPLv2 license that Linux uses. This has prevented Solaris source code from co-mingling with Linux, and has also set up a virtual “Mirror Mirror” universe of OpenSolaris developers that don’t really cooperate with the general Linux population at large. As a result, porting and packaging efforts of major Open Source projects and software to Solaris have been relatively slow when compared to the many releases and fast adoption of the various Linux distributions. However, there has been some recent indication that Sun might release Solaris into GPLv3, which would cause a watershed of activity on the platform, as many packages and projects which run on Linux distributions are going in that direction as well.