Solaris: I have a dream

I have a dream. It's not quite as big as the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but it's important to me. And to many others around here. You'll have no doubt seen this week that the production release of Solaris 10 is now available for download and that we will soon be making the source code available via our Open Solaris web site, under an OSI-approved license.

Open sourcing Solaris is something I've wanted to see happen for a long time. But that's not my dream. It's more than that.

I'm old enough to remember (and to have been there doing it myself), when most UNIX software was initially developed on a Sun workstation. In those days it was running SunOS, our BSD derived operating system. Then that software would be ported to other UNIX platforms like AIX and HP-UX.

Then along came Linux and because it was freely available and ran on cheap hardware, it quite rightly because the UNIX platform (or UNIX-like platform, if you are one of those that doesn't think Linux is UNIX) that developers worked with. Software was then ported to other UNIX flavours (including Solaris).

Here's my dream. I would like to see Solaris become the affordable UNIX developer platform of choice. Solaris will now happily run on a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and SPARC hardware. From cheap low end PC's upto multi-processor Opteron boxes and SPARC servers. It's open source (or soon will be). There are lots of good reasons why you should be using it.

Now I know it's not going to happen over-night. If it's going to happen, I expect it to take several years. I also realize that at this current moment, Linux supports more devices that Solaris 10 running on x86 hardware. But our hardware compatibility list is getting longer every day, and it's going to keep getting better and that change is going to happen fast, as we (and the blossoming Open Solaris community) get the missing hardware support added in.

We are actively working with other major software companies to make sure that their software is available on Solaris 10.

We are also working on the desktop, so that the Java Desktop System on Solaris will be on a par with what is currently on our Linux offerings.

So, can my dream come true? What other functionality or features does Linux have that Solaris needs in order to be the affordable platform of choice for UNIX developers? This is a serious request for feedback. I'd like to know where you think Solaris is currently deficient in this regard.

Thanks.

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( Feb 02 2005, 05:55:50 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink