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With the emergence of open source development, Sun is opening more and more of its intellectual property and in turn creating opportunities for partnerships and technical innovation. A prime example is the Solaris Operating System.
Shortly after the release of the Solaris 10 OS in January 2005, Sun opened the source code of the Solaris OS development build and helped foster creation of the OpenSolaris project community. The rapid growth of the open source OpenSolaris project has helped to fuel adoption of the Solaris 10 OS, with more than 9 million licenses registered as of August 2007.
The OpenSolaris project is designed to build a developer community around the Solaris OS. It is aimed at developers, system administrators, and users who want access to cutting-edge operating system technology that runs on multiple hardware platforms, including SPARC, Intel, and AMD. In the last two years, the OpenSolaris community has blossomed all over the world:
- As of December 2007, OpenSolaris.org had more than 80,000 community members, 57 registered user groups, nearly 190 projects and more than 40 communities
- The OpenSolaris User Group community is an active and growing collaboration, with dozens of technology communities and projects at OpenSolaris.org
- Eleven localized portals exist for OpenSolaris.org, including versions for Brazil, China, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and Russia
- Several OpenSolaris source code distributions have been made to date, and in 2007 Sun announced plans to create an OpenSolaris reference distribution, due in spring 2008
- In Brazil, China, and India, OpenSolaris project events have been massively over-subscribed, with especially high interest among educational institutions
- In May 2006, the OpenSolaris project received the prestigious SIIA Codie award for Best Open Source Solution.
"Sun believes that you can win without everybody else having to lose," says Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer. "We're adjusting Sun for the coming market, not the passing market. In the coming market, you will earn revenue when your customer derives value from your technology, not when they are acquiring it. At acquisition, the important thing will be to be as available as possible to developers and system administrators building the customer solution."
With OpenSolaris, millions of development hours worth of code and more than 1600 patents have been contributed to the open source community. A growing community of academic developers is leveraging innovations in OpenSolaris to improve curricula and instruction and advance their research.
OpenSolaris for Educational Institutions
OpenSolaris has all the powerful new features in the Solaris 10 OS that are helping educational institutions optimize system utilization levels, deliver extreme performance, consolidate servers to reduce cost and complexity, and provide unparalleled security — all with relentless availability and support for SPARC and x64/x86 platforms. While these innovations represent significant value for IT professionals concerned with production environments, they also present new opportunities for educators, researchers, and students in academic and research environments.
» Educators
The OpenSolaris community has developed many teaching resources for computer science educators. The project gives professors and students access to industry-leading technologies available only in the Solaris OS, including Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), Solaris Containers, Predictive Self Healing, and the ZFS file system. This combination makes OpenSolaris especially good for teaching operating systems. DTrace and other tools provide unparalleled observability, while ZFS and Solaris Containers allow for new possibilities in virtualization, emulation, and sandbox environments.
OpenSolaris presents a range of possibilities for computer science curriculums, from a case study to assignments, to a complete operating systems class. Downloadable resources from the OpenSolaris Academic and Research Community include a development guide for a complete operating system curriculum using OpenSolaris technology, available in nine languages, as well as specific "plug-ins" on topics of special interest.
» Researchers
OpenSolaris is a compelling prospect for computer science research. It is the most observable operating system technology in the industry. But OpenSolaris technology also leads in operating system scalability, storage capabilities, availability, and security — the technologies that enable the massive scale of modern Internet services.
The OpenSolaris project offers researchers both an open source base (which is intrinsically better for research) as well as an OS with a compelling industry heritage and acknowledged industry-leading technologies. OpenSolaris continues to enjoy one of the largest research and development budgets of any operating system in the industry.
» Students
The OpenSolaris project gives students access to technologies that are defining the future of computing. With unparalleled observability, OpenSolaris is an especially good choice for learning operating systems. In addition, OpenSolaris features are providing the foundation for modern Internet services, making OpenSolaris a very interesting learning platform for anyone planning a career in IT.
OpenSolaris Features
While OpenSolaris retains standard UNIX utilities and many GNU tools (and specifically, standard UNIX debugging tools such as truss and mdb), OpenSolaris is most famous for key Solaris OS innovations such as DTrace, Containers (Zones), Predictive Self Healing, and ZFS. Many of these features are open sourced under a license that permits them to be ported to other environments.
» DTrace
DTrace is a dynamic tracing framework for troubleshooting systemic problems in real time. With DTrace, users can tune applications for performance and troubleshoot systems with little or no performance impact. The potential of DTrace as a teaching tool is immense both for teaching OS concepts and programming.
» Solaris Containers
Solaris Containers isolate applications and services using flexible, software-defined boundaries and allow private execution environments to be created within a single Solaris OS instance. Each environment has its own identity, separate from the underlying hardware, so it behaves as if it's running on its own system. Containers are quick to boot (as there is no hardware checking involved) and allow multiple students to be root users on the same system with no potential risk to the host environment. This makes Solaris Containers excellent for teaching lightweight virtualization techniques.
» Solaris ZFS
ZFS greatly reduces the administrative burden of file systems, eliminating many complicated administration concepts, such as volume management, entirely. All data is protected by 265-bit checksums with 99.9999999999999999999% error detection and correction, and ZFS automatically repairs corrupted data and completes read and write operations at breathtaking speed.
» Security
Solaris 10 OS incorporates advanced security to protect the education enterprise from both malicious external attacks and internal data access violations. The Process Rights Management component provides fine-grained control over which users and what processes have what rights when. IT administrators may assign the "least privilege" necessary for students to do coursework, participate in research, or even maintain a portion of the department infrastructure.
These are but a few examples of how the innovations in Solaris may be used in academia via the OpenSolaris program. Of course, OpenSolaris contains all the innovations in Solaris 10 OS, such as Predictive Self-Healing, Integrated SAN Support, and a completely rewritten TCP/IP stack that results in blazing performance. Students, faculty, and researchers will harness these features and create innovative applications that we have not even imagined.
Community Involvement
Community involvement and input is critical to the success of the OpenSolaris project. There are many ways to participate in the OpenSolaris community:
- Join the OpenSolaris Academic and Research Community. This community, which consists of academics, students, and Sun employees, is constantly developing new practical resources around the globe. Contact this group at edu-discuss@opensolaris.org
- Become a Center of Excellence. Sun's Center of Excellence (COE) program promotes joint activities between Sun and educational or research institutions, with a focus on activities that are deemed exceptionally advanced. Educational institutions that enter into a COE agreement with Sun will develop a joint activity plan that typically spans one to three years. Contact your Sun sales representative or the OpenSolaris Academic and Research Community, or visit Sun Global Education and Research.
- Develop OpenSolaris curriculum. Solaris OS innovations such as DTrace provide a unique opportunity for instructors to develop new curricula that help students develop a deeper understanding of OS design and workings. We will collaborate with you to develop new instruction materials.
- Host OpenSolaris workshops. Share information and ideas about open source code and OpenSolaris projects. Build an OpenSolaris community on your campus. Sun can also co-host an OpenSolaris launch event on your campus to kick-start the engagement of faculty, students, and IT managers in the OpenSolaris community.
Resources for Academic Developers
Sun offers a portfolio of free resources to help faculty, students, and researchers get the most from their participation in the OpenSolaris community. Visit the Sun Developer Network Sun Academic Developer Program for more information on these resources, which include:
- Free downloads of Solaris 10 OS, Sun Studio 12, and other Sun developer tools
- Free Solaris 10 OS Web-based training
- Learning resources and forums like the New to Solaris Center.
Get the Details
Visit opensolaris.org and subscribe to the OpenSolaris Academic and Research Community, or contact us at edu-opensolaris@sun.com to get more information on OpenSolaris at your campus.
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