Q & A
Stephen Borcich Talks About Open Source Development and Solaris 10
Q: What has Sun's role been in the Open Source Community?
A:
Wow, let me give some stats to date. Our new OpenSolaris initiative to open source the latest Solaris(TM) technology will make Sun the largest contributor of open source, surpassing even the University of California at Berkeley. We have made important contributions to very visible and successful Open Source projects such as those from Apache, Mozilla, GNOME, OpenOffice, and JXTA.org. Additionally, we have worked with customers on implementations of Open Source software on our platforms to make sure the compatibility and performance stands up to their expectations.
Q: What is the significance of Solaris 10?
A:
It is huge and we think everyone else is going to be playing catch up. It's the culmination of 3000 engineering years of development that gives us the best OS in the market bar none. Our customers can use the same safe, protected and scalable operating system they are familiar with on SPARC(R). The Solaris 10 OS runs on more than 350 SPARC and x86-based systems, including the new AMD Opteron processor and compatibility with existing applications is guaranteed. This combination provides Solaris users with the best range of choices and investment protection in the industry .
We've also made migrating to Solaris 10 easier for developers. Sun guarantees compatibility all the way back to Solaris 2.6 and we now offer source code compatibility between SPARC and x86. Got an application that runs on SPARC on Solaris 2.6? It will run unchanged on Solaris 10 on SPARC and only requires a recompile to run on Solaris 10 for x86.
Q: What opportunity does this present to Open Source developers?
A:
There's obviously a tremendous opportunity for ISVs to take advantage of the features that Sun's built into Solaris 10 for performance and optimization improvements. For example, we've added logical partitioning into Solaris with containers. Solaris Containers allow a single system to be treated as multiple systems from the perspective of the applications, each with its own IP address, its own root password, and each can be almost instantaneously rebooted. The containers are secure, so privacy and data integrity at an application level can be guaranteed. We're tackling the issues of cost and complexity in the data center and by working with ISVs to deploy their applications in Solaris Containers we're simplifying the deployment of increasingly complex applications. Another feature that we've gotten a tremendous amount of positive feedback on so far has been dynamic tracing or DTrace. DTrace allows you to track, tune and troubleshoot your systems in realtime. This lets you find the root causes of system and application bottlenecks, and this can simplify application development and deployment.
Additionally, we see a huge opportunity for our partners to go to market with us around Solaris 10. We have hundreds of our partners who are developing applications for Solaris 10 on both SPARC, Opteron 64 and Intel processor-based systems in markets such as financial services, telco, retail and media and entertainment. Our partners continue to be the strongest advocate for our technology, and we are continuing to invest in them in a big way.
Q: How important is it to build a community of developers around OpenSolaris?
A:
OpenSolaris has generated a huge amount of interest because nothing like it has ever really been done before. Taking 21 years of development on Solaris and making it available as an Open Source project is unprecedented. OpenSolaris doesn't change what we have always believed - that it is always better being open than being closed. We are open source and just as importantly open-standards based and have experience working with a large community of developers. Sun was founded on Open Source with BSD, so we think we can contribute something here based on our own experience. We can grow the community of Solaris developers and empower them, to give them a level of control to impact the future of Solaris in a new way.
To grow the community of developers means to be as open as possible. We don't want to just throw code over the wall but make sure that we engage with and grow a vibrant and strong community. Open sourcing the source code for Solaris is just part of what we are doing, encouraging sharing and contributions from the community to foster innovation in Solaris and a governance process to ensure that the community has ownership are also important elements to creating an open development model around Solaris.
Q: How can Open Source developers work more closely with Sun?
A:
We're committed to developers, whether they work with Open Source or commercial software. To help developers move to Solaris 10 and take advantage of all of its exciting new features we've launched the Ten Moves ahead program www.sun.com/partners/10moves.
I would also mention that we have been running a pilot program since September engaging with sys admins and developers from all our markets, including universities, Wall Street, ISVs, etc. We are building a community of developers based on the already existing global Solaris market as well as in markets that we haven't participated heavily in before. For more details visit http://opensolaris.org.
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