Sun To Release Solaris Source Code (10/01/99, 10:13 a.m. ET) By Guy Middleton, TechWeb Sun Microsystems plans to begin releasing its Solaris source code to the public, Friday's Wall Street Journal reports.
Sun's chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos told the paper Sun's internal debate over the move was over and the company was "doing it." "What's left is the physics of getting it out there," Papadopoulos said. The move would give developers free access to the Solaris source code under Sun's Community Source Licensing (SCSL) scheme -- a halfway house to open source that offers access to code but requires revenue from commercial products derived from changes to the code. Sun began the SCSL approach with Java 2 in December 1998 and has since extended the approach to other Java technologies and the SPARC V8 processor architecture. One analyst saw this as a move to compete with Linux's burgeoning popularity. "I think they've come to the conclusion that this is the way to compete with the killer advantage of Linux -- access to source code," said Robin Bloor, an analyst at Bloor Research, Milton Keynes, U.K. "By making it community source, they can get the support of the developer community. ISVs and businesses that use the OS can start adding value to Solaris." Bloor added that while competing with Linux across the lower end of the server market, the new approach might also encourage expanding companies to choose Solaris if they outgrew the capabilities of the free OS. "Linux started with the sub-$1,000 server market and now it's eating into the sub-$25,000 market," he said. "Sun is lining Solaris up to have the same culture as Linux for when people need to migrate up." Dr. Mitul Mehta head of IT research at Frost & Sullivan, Europe, saw the move as a means to broaden vendor support for the OS. "Sun is trying to get other industry players involved," Mehta said. "They are hoping that this will link it up to second- and third-tier computing players. It's about creating mindshare." "There will be three camps that survive: HP-UX, Monterey, and the other will be Solaris," he said of the key commercial Unix implementations. "Sun wants an alliance around Solaris like they did with Java." "At the end of the day, the issue is how you allow innovation, but also have a reasonable process by which the community sticks together on the core as it evolves," said Anil Gadre, general manager of Sun's Solaris division, in the report. When Sun set out the principles of community source in December, it said the model, "creates a community of widely available software source code just as does the open source model, but with two significant differences requested by our licensees, as follows: Compatibility among deployed versions of the software is required and enforced through testing proprietary modifications and extensions, including performance improvements, are allowed." No one from Sun was available for comment on the report.
