ResearchOpen Solaris - Where is it Now?
Sun Microsystems is one example of the "second-generation" effect of the IT world. A mature company that's been around since the microcomputer came to the home, it's challenge in the 21st century became to keep up with the computing industry which it helped shape. Sun looked at their falling profit margins around the turn of the century and asked, "How can we pick up a new market?" Like many IT companies, the answer was open source. From this, the Open Solaris operating system was born.
Open Solaris is released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is related to the Mozilla Public License. The CDDL was approved as an open source license by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in January 2005 and is a "free software license" according to the FSF's exacting definition. When the fateful day came, programmers everywhere cheered it on, both as the dawning of a new day for the Solaris system and as the possible sign of things to come, such as the eventual opening of the Java language, Sun's golden-egg-laying goose.
The Open Solaris system has so far become available in three flavors for the PC: Belenix, Nexenta, and Shillix. Belenix and Shillix are purely Solaris systems, with much GNU utilities and programs in sight. Nexenta is a hybrid of Debian Linux and Solaris. In addition, a hybrid of Solaris and Gentoo Linux, called "Portaris", is currently in development. "MarTux", a release of Open Solaris for the Sparc workstation, and "Polaris" for the PowerPC are also in the running, rounding out the choices. Of the PC versions available, Belenix and Nexenta have so far come out ahead.
This has been the most exciting time in Solaris's history. Sun Microsystems, after years of being a wallflower in the open source world, timidly pushed their offering onto the table and stood back, only to watch with astonishment as their stock rose. Regular home users, for the first time, could experience Sun's software on their home systems! Small businesses and garage start-ups began adopting Sun! The Java platform suddenly bobbed back up in the market! And like any open system, they started getting all this development work from the user community for free! Problems that Sun has wrestled with for years suddenly began to resolve themselves. Meanwhile, Sun is still free to cash in on business support-contracts for it's system, has a more accessible platform on which they can market Java-based IT solutions, and benefits from a bigger market for it's industrial-strength Sparc and ultra-Sparc servers.
As for the open source community, they also couldn't be happier. Open source development has traditionally had a slightly precarious position in the IT field, and it wasn't until BSD and Linux systems began to be used and advocated by the likes of Google and IBM that open source was assured a permanent place in the industry. With Sun Microsystems, open source has yet another powerful ally on it's side, and the open source community has expressed it's support with the aim of demonstrating that what it could do for Google and IBM, it could do for Sun.