MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-06-08 |
| FROM | From: "Inker, Evan"
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] 'Open-source' Solaris draws lukewarm response
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07 June 2004
'Open-source' Solaris draws lukewarm response
What will it actually change?
By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld
Sun's announcement this week that it plans to make Solaris an "open-source"
operating system has been met with mixed reactions from users and scepticism
from open-source advocates.
"I'm totally nonplussed by the announcement," said Dale Pickford, chief
infrastructure officer at Ocwen Technology. Ocwen last year consolidated
around 140 servers into several high-end Sun servers running Solaris - one
with more than 100 processors. For smaller servers with four or fewer CPUs,
Linux on Intel is suitable, Pickford said. But for systems larger than that,
"the Sparc and Solaris environment really comes into its own," he said. "And
once you start playing at that level anyway, you don't want to be messing
with the OS."
Terry Verity, CIO at Seneca College in Toronto, runs 66 Sun servers,
including one with an Oracle database containing 50 million records. Verity
said he opted for Solaris over Linux because it's strongly supported, secure
and well maintained. Although Verity said using Linux is becoming less of a
security concern, he plans to stick with Solaris. Allowing developers to
make contributions to source code is a good thing, he said: "We like to get
at source code because we think we can do more interesting things with it."
At Sun's announcement in Shanghai this week, its president and COO Jonathan
Schwartz said Sun would "take the model that we used with Java" and extend
it to Solaris. "Make no mistake, we will open-source Solaris."
But open-source advocates maintain that the Java licensing scheme isn't a
true open-source model because it still gives Sun control over the final
product, said Eric Raymond, president of the non-profit Open Source
Initiative. "We don't think we have grounds for optimism here," he said.
Jon Hall, executive director of Linux International, a vendor group that
promotes Linux use, said the fact that the announcement was made in Shanghai
suggests that it was aimed at countries such as China that are pushing
open-source over proprietary systems. But for commercial users, analysts
doubt it will have much impact.
"I don't think that they will care whether or not Solaris is developed using
an open-source model," said Perry Donham, an enterprise systems consultant
at Collaborative Consulting in Woburn, Mass. "They will care that the
software works and that they can get support from Sun."
Unix systems, primarily IBM's AIX, HP's HP-UX and Solaris, are losing ground
to Linux and Windows. According to IDC, 866,000 Unix operating system
shipped worldwide in 2000. That declined to 622,000 in 2002. IDC is still
assembling its 2003 data, but analyst Dan Kusnetzky said he expects that
those numbers to also show a decline.
"I think Sun is trying to slow down or perhaps halve the erosion of its base
by trying to offer in Solaris the things that are perceived as attractive
about Linux and other open-source environments," said Kusnetzky. They
include the ability to have some input and make source-code changes, he
said.
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