Submitted by “Today Sun extends its position as the top contributor of code to the free and open source software community by donating its storage software code to the OpenSolaris Project. This will enable community members to combine OpenSolaris with hardware from any source to create new storage solutions at a fraction of the price of traditional proprietary storage vendors.”
What a big yawn…they are trumpeting what is already open source and part of opensolaris for years now, and news sites are all printing articles likes this.
The only way this would be worthy of new is if they were changing the license to be a little less restrictive than the current one.
The only thing “new” is the promise to open up SAM-FS and QFS, but that was just a “promise” for a later date…maybe we should just hold off on the articles until then.
Amazing what a press release with no real content and just the words “open source” can buy you for free.
I agree, sort of. However, I do think they need to make a big deal out of open-sourcing the Availability Suite; a mature volume replication package is generally pretty expensive, and the volume copy functionality looks neat too.
Also, I do hope they follow through on QFS. A mature cluster filesystem for free sounds pretty good as well. Do the math: Pretty soon Solaris will have a checksumming volume manager (ZFS), a snapshotting filesystem (ZFS), a cluster filesystem (QFS), an iSCSI target, a traditional volume manager (SVM), replication and volume copy, and tiered storage (SAM-FS), all for free, and besides the iSCSI target, it is all quite mature.
But still people will whine about drivers…
People still whine about drivers on Linux, so I don’t see the driver situation changing anytime soon for any platform that isn’t Windows…
For example, my wireless adapter still doesn’t work properly under Ubuntu even though it’s a few years old.
Edited 2007-04-14 23:32 UTC
Uhm, isn’t it the GPL which is restrictive in this case and not the CDDL?
Anyway, I think what Sun is doing is very cool, and chances are I’ll run it as soon as there actually exist a decent distribution of it instead of OS X.
Wrong. This is actually a new code drop that was recently done, and was not part of OpenSolaris.
Notably, there is greatly expanded support for mpxio, iscsi, etc.
Are you kidding? The current license is one of the least restrictive copyleft licenses there are. The only thing less restrictive would be the BSD license.
You may wish to read up a bit on the new storage project:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/avs/
Edited 2007-04-14 23:30 UTC
So tell me again, how does Sun make money? It seems like everything that I once thought of as Sun – Solaris, Java, even their Hardware designs – is out there for anyone to use. I can’t imagine they sell enough hardware. Does there money now come mostly though support contracts? I want to know, because this sets a standard for other companies – if it succeeds.
Not all their products are opened up. A lot of Sun products are still pay-for. The hardware is also another source, as is support contracts. They offer contracts to support entire data centres, which definitely wouldn’t be cheap.
I think it’s about the complete solution(how’s that for a circa 1999 buzz word), rather than trying to piece together open source variants. Most companies that aren’t IT companies tend to lean towards the complete package. In Sun’s case, they can provide the software, hardware, and support. I’m starting to realize that there’s probably an inverse relationship between open source community support and the higher you get with open source in terms of enterprise use. So, Open Office gets far more public support than a Sun derived iScsi target module for instance.
At any rate, it’s still cool stuff. I’m starting to get more interested in storage. I’m pushing hard for an iScsi based cluster at work using Novell’s software.
Edited 2007-04-14 02:32
I wouldn’t agree, those who contribute to OpenOffice.org probably have a different interest in regards to software development.
I mean, if you’re going to make that statement, then wouldn’t it hold true to the number of opensource applications out there being developed which are merely duplicates of each other – why have khtml when there is gecko?
Different people are attracted to different things, relating to the iSCSI module, those who programme in that *could* contribute to OpenOffice.org, but have no real interest in the technology – its too ‘boring’.
For Sun, they’ll find that as their community grows so will the number of contributors. Sun doesn’t expect these contributors to replace full time programmers but instead help boost the development effort to push OpenSolaris forward at a faster pace.
Agreed.
That wasn’t the point I was making. More people have a direct stake in a rendering engine than iScsi, regardless of how many projects try to reinvent the wheel.
I agree again. But I don’t think the uptake in community support for Sun’s iScsi will grow nearly as fast as OO.org for instance. Again, how many people use iScsi compared to OO.org? To run OO.org, all you need is a PC that will run it. To use iScsi properly, you need a certain outlay of hardware, which can get expensive quickly. If a company or organization are going to put out the money for the hardware, they’re going to want proper support.
I think you missed my point. Maybe I didn’t explain it well. Hopefully this clears it up.
Edited 2007-04-14 16:52
But more people using doesn’t necessarily translate into more people being able to contribute to its development; for example, GTK is a very popular project, tonnes of people use GTK on a regular basis and yet the number who actually maintain the library are very small.
But who said they would? iSCSI is an enterprise class piece of technology and Sun certainly don’t expect the same level of usage that one would expect from a rendering engine, but at the same time, by opensourcing it, it enables not only those who can contribute, able to make their contributions available but encourage third party hardware vendors to work on the same code as well.
Yes, I understand, but at the same time, there are those who do have the hardware support, in a large organisation and correct the issue themselves. People don’t expect to be able ‘support the whole thing’ themselves but at the same time, they also want the ability when they can’t correct things, to have the backing of Sun to correct the issue.
There is not a single UNIX vendor that breaks even on their flagship operating system. Platform development is always heavily subsidized by hardware, application, and service revenues. Even middlewear is beginning to lose money these days.
You’re going to see a lot of change in the way software and other content is delivered over the next decade. In the past, content was either premium or supported by advertising. Today, the content is the advertisement. The content is the reason that your customers buy your products. You want as many people as possible to experience your content in the hopes that they buy the device and the service that enhances the content.
Sun is advertising their products by putting their platform software out there for anyone to use. It runs on your existing hardware, but it’s optimized for Sun’s hardware. It’s not difficult to set up, but Sun will make it easier, and they’ll guarantee it. Try it, you’ll like it, and then you’ll want to make it even better by signing on the dotted line.
NOTE: These opinions are purely my own and not those of my employer. I do not speak for IBM on these forums.
BTW: 1000th post!
Edited 2007-04-14 02:26
I’m not going to pretend to know exactly how Sun or any other company dabbling in open source make their money (notwithstanding the comment directly above), but it strikes me as funny how the article posted below this one (‘Dear Mr Gates: Save Vista, Open-Source It’) is full of flames about how stupid it is for a proprietary company to open source their products.
Well here is a company that is open sourcing their products one after the other. There must be something good about it.
Doesn’t Red Hat already offer many of these different types of products but they’re just not as mature as the Sun offerings yet. I think Sun could see that competing OSS was maturing to the point of their own software and that now they’re just trying to stay as much ahead of the curve as possible, especially since it wouldn’t make as much sense to keep funding R & D into those areas when a free alternative is quickly matching your own products features and maturity.
When are people going to realize that OSS is popular among companies because it reduces R & D costs in areas that are quickly becoming commodities and allows for many companies to battle against the riches of Microsoft by sharing resources as Microsoft is constantly expanding into new markets with products like C# that were once dominated by others such as Sun because of the huge revenues that they receive from Windows and Office.
The strenght of further opening source of Sun Software in comparision with lets say Redhat is that sun is a hardware company while the rest of fully open sourced companies are just software based and they need to convince other OEM companies to write software that are compatible with their platform.
Sun can make sure their software are more polished and bug dry if they open source it; while their engineers will make sure that performance will be the best on their propietary hardware (SPARC), thus advertising their software on x86.
So x86 is an advertizement of software capabilies with reduced performance until you buy one of their SPARC based systems.
There is nothing but good in that. Hardware will work flawless on their sparcs and it will be 100% tested thus certified, exactly like Apples approach.
SPARC, proprietary? What part? The processor?
Wrong: http://www.opensparc.org
The BIOS?
Wrong:
http://www.openbios.org/
http://www.openfirmware.org/
Wrong again. Solaris is fully functional and accelerated on the x86 platform, so are their storage solutions.
Please name any functionality Sun is responsible for that is not available on x86 (excluding SPARC specific hardware features which matter little anyway).
Sun’s software solutions are fully supported on x86. You do not have to have SPARC.
“Please name any functionality Sun is responsible for that is not available on x86”
XVR-2500 RoHS compliant graphics accelerator card for 3-D high-end graphics
Which is irrelevant since I was talking about *software*, not Sun hardware, and even if I was, it certainly wouldn’t be about 3D cards. There are other 3d accelerator providers so your point is moot as well.
Not only that, Sun licenses some of the their software and hardware from other parties. So they are not directly responsible for some of it, which means they are not fully in control of it either.
Edited 2007-04-15 06:01 UTC