'Open Source Solaris' - coming soon, from Sun

Sun Microsystems will create an open source project around its Solaris 10 operating system by the end of the year, company executives said on Monday.

Through the initiative, Sun engineers, partners and other programmers will be able to contribute to the development of the Unix operating system. Sun is testing the program right now with customers and will finalise it by the end of the year, according to Mark McClain, Sun's vice president of software marketing. Sun discussed its open source plans at a Solaris 10 briefing with press and analysts at the company's Burlington, Massachusetts, offices. The new operating system will be faster and more resilient to hardware and software errors.

The goal of open sourcing Solaris 10, a major update of Sun's operating system set for completion by the end of the year, is to build interest in Solaris. In particular, the open source project is aimed at developers and academics who will be able to make modifications to the code, Sun executives said.

The open source project will help Sun improve ties with a developer community outside of Sun, including volunteer programmers and academics, McClain said.

"We lost sight of being an innovative leader who is active in the developer community," McClain said.

Sun is now in the process of preparing for the project, which some Solaris engineers call Open Source Solaris in internal blogs.

The work done by Sun engineers will constitute the core operating system. For future versions, Sun will pick from the additions submitted by other project participants while ensuring that Solaris does not split into different, incompatible versions, executives said. Sun will model its open source project on what Apple is doing with Darwin or Red Hat does with Fedora, said Glen Weinberg, vice president of Sun's operating platforms group.

As part of preparations, the company working out legal concerns, establishing a mechanism to take outside contributions, and discussing the proper governance model for the open source project, company executives said. Because some portions of Solaris 10, such as device drivers, are the property of other companies, Sun will release source code as well as binaries, in which proprietary code is not accessible, Weinberg said.

One customer at the briefing said that he is eager to have Sun make Solaris 10 open source. By making the code visible, Sun customers will have an easier time making third-party open source software work well with Solaris, said James Dobson, systems architect at Dartmouth College, who is using Solaris in medical imaging applications.