Sun Opens OpenSolaris.Org

An anonymous reader writes "Sun has launched the first version of opensolaris.org, featuring a small initial drop of source code. The idea is to make a display of good faith to the Solaris community while the rest of the source code due diligence is completed. The source code for Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is available for download under the terms of the newly OSI-approved CDDL license."

Now that's a concept

Sun really seems to like the Open-.org naming convention. They are probably trying to oppose Steve Jobs' iNaming.

Re:Now that's a concept

They should revive their "Open Windows" trademark to issue a open source operating system distro - be it Solaris or Linux. That would be a perfect revenge for Microsofts litigation against Lindows.

Re:Now that's a concept

now they can all merge with a financial services company and be iOpenING.org . har har har

Re:Now that's a concept Uh oh

Sun's been using the term "Open" in their stuff forever. Remember, Sun's X environment was called "OpenWindows", and even though they've since discontinued the old OpenWindows window manager, their X server still resides in "/usr/openwin".

Though Sun's definition of "Open" has traditionally been "open standards", as opposed to the F/OSS definition which I believe to be "open implementations".

Hot-Swappable

I just want the cool features of solaris (such as hot-swappable processors on a multi-processor system) to be ported to Linux. Honestly, bot OS can and should merge into one entity. less fork, more merge.

Re:Hot-Swappable

Merging solaris code into the linux kernel is a lot more difficult then implementing the feature from scratch. This is largely due to the codebases being wildly different but other difficulties contribute to the problem.

On the bright side, hot swappable processors, memory and pci cards are already in linux. enjoy!

Re:Hot-Swappable

Sun has an aweful track record of maintaining anything on the web. That includes their external website. A small example, you can't even find sun's Burlington Mass address on the site. Trust me, the list is a mile long. I expect this .org site to be well maintained for about a year at most.

Re:Hot-Swappable

Actually, one thing I really like about Solaris is a forwards-compatable interface for kernel modules (i.e. drivers and such). This is something that Linux feels downright embarassing at (heck, they're not even compatable from one build to another, yet alone a point version), and I'm really not sure how FreeBSD is at this (havn't checked).

I can take a device driver written for Solaris version X, and chances are pretty good that it "will just work" on Solaris X+1 and maybe even X+2. (heck, I've even seen a single device driver module "supported" on multiple versions by a HW vendor) The only real requirement is that the module be built for the same architecture as the kernel (i.e. a 32-bit module won't work on a 64-bit kernel, and vice versa).

Dynamic Tracing

I'm glad that the source code is starting to be released, but could someone more knowledgable explain what Dynamic Tracing is? Is it something that would be useful to a normal user?

Re:Dynamic Tracing

From the link provided in the article:

DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.

So the answer to your question is: no, it's not useful for a "normal" user.

Re:Dynamic Tracing

The best place to go for this information is the well documented Dtrace FAQs [sun.com].

From it, I shamelessly lifted the following brief synopsis:

Q. What is DTrace?

A. DTrace is a new facility in the Solaris Operating System that adds dynamic instrumentation and tracing to the kernel and can be used on production systems. It's a power tool that can be used by both the entry-level and experienced system administrators to diagnose and resolve problems in hours or minutes that might have previously taken days.

Q. What are the benefits of DTrace?

A.

Faster resolution of performance problems for system administrators

Quicker time to market and higher quality product for developers

Greater utilization of existing system resources for IT managers

Q. What are the key highlights of DTrace?

A.

Comprehensive coverage: over 30,000 instrumentation points in even the smallest system; integrated access to both application and kernel data

Always available: built-in with no need to reboot or otherwise reconfigure system, disable or alter applications, or disable user/client access

Safe: cannot panic system and has no impact on the system when not being used

Enable only the trace points you need

Analyzes data in real time on production systems

Extensible as new analysis routines can be built for re-use using the D programming language

Q. What is the performance overhead of DTrace?

A. When not in use, DTrace has no impact on system performance or other behavior. When being used, DTrace overhead is dependent on the number of probe points being observed.

Q. How does Sun's DTrace compare with competitive offerings?

A. DTrace is the only dynamic tracing tool available that eliminates the need for collecting and processing event data. With DTrace a system administrator can query the system experiencing the problem in real time, while in production, and get accurate and precise information regarding the source of the problem. No log files are generated, and there is no data to analyze. This reduces the time it takes to identify and resolve problems by orders of magnitude! Literally from days to minutes.

Containers are based on software. They offer logical separation with the same OS in each Container. Containers offer enormous scalabilty: while there is no hard coded limit, upto 4000 per OS image are available and is beyond normal requirements today.

Q. Can DTrace be used without knowing the D language?

A. You can leverage scripts developed by others (such as those available on the Sun BigAdmin portal). However, it is not difficult to learn D which is very similar to the ANSI C programming language with a special set of functions and variables to make tracing easy.

Re:Dynamic Tracing

Basicly, I think of it as the Ultimate Packet Sniffer command line tool, being applied to processes and your system as a whole, along with a scripting language for your pleasure.

It lets you track/compare/analyze users and processes in real-time to basicly tell you what your computer is really doing and lets you pinpoint who/why it is doing it, system wide, without configuration changes or restarts..

Look forward to a lot of REALLY powerful scripts coming from this(there is an experimental rootkit coming out even, that used dtrace to sniff out passwords in system memory, etc). Very powerful, very dangerous.

Too busy to post

Is everyone so busy downloading that they don't have time to post their anti/pro solaris comments?

Shocking, I tell you.

Thank you to the folks at Sun...

What a lot of Slashdotters might not realize is that Sun has spent literally millions of hours over the last couple of years "unencumbering" Solaris from patented code that was owned by other companies opposed to the open sourcing of their intellectual property. They did this for no reason other than to prove to the open source community that they are serious about open sourcing Solaris, and hopefully to sell some good Sun iron in the process.

It would be nice to see some Slashdotters give Sun their well deserved props for a change, instead of ripping on them.

"What? You gave us OpenOffice? That's not good enough..." I hoping this thread doesn't turn into another Sun bash fest because this time they deserve a little respect for giving away what I see as the crown jewels of their company.

Re:Thank you to the folks at Sun...

The real question is whether Sun's license is compatible with the GPL.

That's not a question; it is not compatible.

Re:Thank you to the folks at Sun...

I was kind of under the impression that this move was masterminded by Microsoft (via the multi-billion dollar deal they had with Sun) as an attempt to fragment the Open Source community. I could be very wrong, but it seems to make the most sense that way. The real question is whether Sun's license is compatible with the GPL.

Microsoft doesn't have any control over Sun at all. You might have thought this because MS paid Sun $2 billion as part of a settlement agreement, but really, they did this because they had to and because Sun was willing to do them a favor and let them off easy. If Sun had wanted to keep fighting that fight forever, they could have, and probably would have ended up with more cash, although they might have gone out of business before any damages were won.

Believe me, folks at Sun dislike MS business tactics as much as you do.

Re:Thank you to the folks at Sun...

On a personal level, I agree. On an investor level, your comment scares me a bit. Sun still makes up for a decent percentage of my tech portfolio. I would like to understand what Sun is hoping to achieve through this investment.

They are continuing to face declining market shares. They could have used the money to build better hardware and marketing campaigns. They could have also provided enhancements to the existing Linux infrastructure to be better compatible with their hardware.

Still, the geek in me is happy with Sun and I guess that's a start.

--
Discount Cartridges [gatewayink.com]

1,600 patents

Their press release at sun.com said OpenSolaris via the CDDL will make 1,600 patents available to open source.

Last plead of Solaris to the OpenSource community

Otherwise it will enjoy a slow death. Obviously maturing and growth of Linux, scared the hell out of Schwartz and his cohorts. Now they are trying to appeal to the OS community to give their precious operating system, which they locked up under layers of safes many many years and expect them to stop or slow down working on linux and make their solaris better instead, which they will be more than happy to incorporate the development and charge the corporations an arm and a leg.

I am not sure about you but I am not buying this half-hearted OpenSolaris movement.

Come, come to my web little fly, said spider...

Really need...

Yes, I've already read the wonderful glowing market-speak summary of the CDDL at OpenSolaris.org...

What I really need, and haven't yet found is a nice overall summary of the key licensing points behind the CDDL from someone who isn't Sun.

Anyone?

Thanks in advance!

webpage running on linux?

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.open solaris.org OS Server Last changed IP address Linux Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.6 Linux Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)

Re:webpage running on linux?

Check the machine itself. It says:

Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1

Dtrace and Linux vs Solaris argument

I run SUSE and Redhat ES server here at work but I can't help being excited about DTrace and what it can offer the whole Open Source *Nix world. Sun is definitely helping the Open Source movement by first reelasing OpenOffice and now, DTrace, the most talkeda bout feature of Solaris 10. Wonder how that will effect this between a Solaris developer and a Linux kernel coder? [slashdot.org]

More than 1,600 patents

Part of this release is the opening of more than 1,600 patents to the open source community.

link [yahoo.com]

IBM just got outdone on their 500 patent release. Let's see them come back with 5,000! Come on, it can be a Sun/IBM "who can give away the most patents to open source" war :)

Finkployd

Well, there's a little problem with those patents.

The press releases say those patents are only for software under the CDDL license and the OpenSolaris process.

They can be enforced against GPL software including the Linux kernel.

Bruce

Re:Well, there's a little problem with those paten

We're not talking about lifting code. That is covered by copyright law. Software patents cover applications of mathematical principles.

Bruce

The fifth board member...

The fifth board member will be Bruce Perens. I think I tipped it with this [slashdot.org]. For the link shy:
FTA: However, a source close to Open Source Risk Management (OSRM), which commissioned Ravicher's review, claimed to know what the Jan. 25 announcement was and told NewsForge that it had nothing to do with Ravicher's study.
So, come on Bruce... what's the announcement. We know they meant you! Spill it baby

Blogs on souce code and DTrace

Bryan Cantrill, one of the DTrace developers wrote this blog entry [sun.com] as a general introduction to the source code layout and also to DTrace. This post by Adam Leventhal [sun.com] goes into some more detail.

82678 lines of C were made public. No registration, no click through license before download. The OpenSolaris FAQ is pretty good [opensolaris.org] btw, and there's also a roadmap page [opensolaris.org].

According to this blog [cuddletech.com] (the entry dated 15:43), those in the pilot program (more than 100 developers out side of Sun) have today gotten access to the entire Solaris source base, and have already built their own version - screen shot [cuddletech.com].

Sun press releases

The first one [sun.com] is the basic announcement. The second one [sun.com] announces Sun making available the 1,600 patents for Solaris available to the community.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - January 25, 2005 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. [NASDAQ: SUNW] today announced the largest single release of patent innovations into the open source community by any organization to date, marking a significant shift in the way Sun positions its intellectual property portfolio. By giving open source developers free access to Sun OpenSolaris related patents under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), the company is fostering open innovation and establishing a leadership role in the framework of a patent commons that will be recognized across the globe.

"As the largest business contributor to the open source community, Sun has always been an ardent believer in open standards and the open source process going back to the inception of this company," said Scott McNealy, Chairman and CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The release of more than 1,600 patents associated with the Solaris OS far eclipses any other vendor's contribution. Today represents a huge milestone for Sun, for the community, for developers and for customers."

Sun's goal in offering access to these patents is to help facilitate innovation and help users get new open source products and technologies to market faster without having to obtain patent licenses from Sun. The new approach underscores Sun's belief that license agreements for software are not as significant as the company who stands behind its products. Sun is also addressing current issues and increased scrutiny in U.S. and international patent law which has increasingly granted overly broad patents on abstract processes.

In removing the emphasis on intellectual-property rights as an inhibitor to innovation, Sun is leveling the playing field in key emerging markets and helping to revive an innovation system that is straining under a record number of patent filings globally. More markets are looking for ways to monetize their knowledge economy and patents are becoming the profit center. With growing attention on locking up intellectual property in countries like China - which has seen a five-fold increase in the number of patent filings from 1991 to 2001 - Sun is ensuring that software will be available to open source developers and that progress continues unabated.

"By gaining access to these Solaris OS patents, participants in the open-source community now have a tremendous opportunity to build unique and innovative technologies for a wide range of markets," said Stacey Quandt, Senior Business Analyst, Open Source Practice Leader, Robert Frances Group. "An IP contribution of this magnitude has the potential to deliver exceptional value to developers and strengthens the overall open source community."

Addressing the patent system that is under siege, Sun's pledge of open access reduces the quagmire for developers who previously had to walk through a minefield to avoid infringement and enables them to confidently produce derivative works without fear of reprisal or patent claims.

Radically reducing risks associated with using and developing open source software, Sun is firmly standing behind our products and the worldwide development community. Armed with access to Solaris OS platform intellectual property, OpenSolaris developers and customers alike no longer need patent protection or indemnity from Sun's and other participants in the OpenSolaris community for use of Solaris-based technologies under the CDDL and OpenSolaris community process.

By releasing the OpenSolaris OS platform under the CDDL, the open source community will immediately gain access to 1,600 active Sun patents for all aspects of operating system technologies that encompass features ranging from kernel tech

10 years too late?

If you notice its the same fro open sourcing frotnier fro Dave Winer..

Only the core devleopers of the OS and no outsiders..

and tha tis not enough to reoslve the shrinking market share..

It snot low price alone that People are choosing Red Hat or other Linux vendors but the degree of openeness and cooperative goals world wide amoung very different companies like Sun(Gnome), IBM(Red Hat/Suse), HP, and etc..

and when you have Solaris hardware at $16,000 compared to the same hardware from tigerdirect at $6,000 I think maybe there is a large problem at SUN

Based on the success of another site:

here [militaryintelligence.org]

D-Trace Questions.

Ok, I read the link to the sun page about D-Trace but that really didn't answer the questions I had. So can any Sun users explain:

1. Why has Sun open sourced this of all things?
2. It seems very similar to gdb in role. Is this assumption correct? Does it compare favorably?
3. Is a Linux/BSD/whatever port of this desirable/attainable? Or does it rely to much on the guts of SunOS? Do we have better tools already on those OS's?

Please be gentle. :)

Sun Compiler and Tools

I presume (though I don't really know) that Solaris needs to be built with Sun's C compiler. Is this compiler coming forth as an open source release too? If not, is it going to be freely available? If I remember correctly, you currently need to pay in order to get Sun's cc.

If it is coming, this is great news. A compiler highly optimized for Sparc may benefit all operating systems that run on it. Who knows, maybe their x86 compiler has some good features too. Sun's libc (probably highly optimized for Sparc) would be a nice thing to have. Anything else?

Re:Sun Compiler and Tools

You can (and infact Sun does) compile Solaris with gcc. Our production AMD64 kernel and a large number of the AMD64 libraries are compiled with gcc . However the makefile assume the Sun C compiler but the build environment has a wrapper around gcc to make it look like the Sun compiler.

CDE?

Just out of curiosity, who owns CDE? Is Sun able to release this as open source? I've wanted to get my hands on version that works well with Linux or is open source for awhile now, with no luck...

First look at source...

So, I downoad the code, and I take a look at it - the first thing through my mind, is "OMG - look at all the spagetti code!"

Then I realized I opened a C file with Unix returns with notepad.

Oops.

OpenJava.org?

Wake me when Java goes Open Source...

Quote from the website

The Solaris operating system is being released under the terms of the OSI-approved, CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License). Millions of development hours worth of code and over 1,600 patents are being contributed to the open source community.

Ha! Suck it, SCO!

Sun just stop!

Stop using every product in your inventory as a "political" statement, we just don't care anymore. Give customers what they want at a reasonable price and just shut the hell up. If you want to make a statement - make better products.

BEWARE THIS IS SOURCE POISON

Sun reserves the right to enforce the patents if you use code under a different license.

Although the terms of the license would allow you to fork under the gpl or contribute to a gpl'd project sun could still nail you with the patents.

A matched set

Now I can run it right next to my OpenVMS. -- Scott

The Logo...

its gradient background is not dithered!

Nobody care about 64k-screen users anymore... <sigh>

CDDL and GPL3

Incredible. It's actually happening. WAY TO GO SUN!

Now, the great question in open source will be whether the GPL3 and CDDL can be made to be mutually compatible. If this can happen, OpenSolaris and Linux could conceivably combine all their strengths and change the face of computing.

Solaris is Proven and an Industry Tool. Linux has more "street smarts" and some better designed parts (IIRC the scheduler might be an example here?). If I understand matters right now, CDDL code could go into GPL code but not vice versa. Which is a shame in some ways, because I think the Solaris name is a coin that open source could make good use of.

IBM vs. Sun Patent Pledges

There is a big difference between the IBM and SUN patent pledges.

IBM listed a broad range of software licenses, importantly including the GPL, which means linux is covered.

Sun's license so far is limited to Solaris, or at least it looks that way, where they have contributed code under the CDDL. This means if you take a method (or read about a method) that they use in Solaris and apply it elsewhere you can still get slammed.

Not a black and white issue though, as the discerning reader will note that the GPL has not patent clause at all, so the CDDL is stronger in one sense there. Not sure if Linux is any worse off.

But it will be interesting to see how Solaris comes out as open source, incredibly it has gotten to this point for those who remember the Sun of the past (and even some of the current ranting). Losing market share is an incredible motivator it seems :) Fun stuff though, and I think pragmatism will win the day if there good stuff is delivered.

I couldn't find the .torrent

Anybody know where to look?

32bit Sparc (Sun4 c/d/m) support off of this?

I'd not mind if this allowed us to escape the "non-supported" part of Solaris by allowing 32bit SPARC machines and the peripherals they run(Yep, that includes some ZX support) to run a build of this. Throwing out a good chunk of the installed userbase on Solaris 10 and then releasing source for it, is not the best idea out there.

CDDL

I've now read their Common Developement and Distribution License (CDDL), and it seems rather complicated, complex and problematic. It is a free software license, and even some type of copyleft. But it is so wordy and uses such a complex language that it is hard to tell what it really says in some sections, and some of that could even be used to construe a workaround for the copyleftism... In addition, it contains a shitload of of special patent-related rules... All in all, it is NOT GPL compatible, and not SANity compatible to read :( They must have smoked some expensive shit when writing this...

Quality Code?

Um, does anyone have a comment about the quality of the code in the download?

Personally, I'm a bit disappointed with the rather meagre commenting and suspect stuff like parenthesizing return statements.

Porting possibilities

I hope someone is looking into porting that DTrace beauty over to linux if it's possible (i.e. if it's messing around in kernel space or is using process/system info only available on Solaris it might not be possible...?)

Torvalds Redefines Skepticism to Mean Laziness

Saw this on one of the OpenSolaris related blogs. It's an interesting (and provocative!) perspective:

I read an interesting article on news.com yesterday where Linus Torvalds proclaimed that Solaris x86 is a "Joke." It's difficult to counter this type of arrogance, especially when it's rooted in laziness. Torvalds states that " Solaris/x86 is a joke, last I heard. (It has) very little support for any kind of strange hardware..." Let's take a look at the laziness this statement displays. "Last I heard"? He can't be bothered to check this out himself? He allows others to form his opinions for him? Amazing. Sure he's busy, but he should take the time to find out what's going on with Solaris before speaking about it publically.

http://devurandom.blogspot.com/

Is the CDDL a positive for OSS developers?

(Disclosure: I work for Sun)

Reading these threads, here are some points that I think need to be stressed:

1. The CDDL isn't "Sun's license" any more than, e.g., the MPL is Mozilla.org's license, etc.

2. Obviously, there are a lot of open-source developers who don't like the GPL. (Just look at the huge number of important applications that use other open-source licenses.)

3. Of those developers, will the CDDL be viewed as a step forward? Will it be viewed (after the dust settles) as one of the best of the open-source licenses they could use?

Who cares about Solaris?!

... give us Java, you fucking morons!

Re:How long...

Didn't Sun buy a SCO license? Oh wait, that isn't a guarantee of not being sued by SCO, I forgot. my bad

Re:yay!

Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC are 90+% the same source code, differing only where porting requires. So, the OS programmers on the SPARC side == the OS programmers on the x86 side.

Re:1600 Patents?

It doesn't matter nearly as much if they invented them or not, but it sounds like they're making an IBM-style pledge to use their patents as a shield for the open source community rather than a sword against it.

Re:How they think to create one community?

It's only an expression, you should really just relax :)

Finkployd

Re:How they think to create one community?

Because after all we know it's a sin against RMS to run a business.

Is Solaris based on BSD or SysV?

If Solaris is based on SCO's System 5 code, then wouldn't opening it's source (whether Sun has the right or not) potentially pollute other open source projects that borrowed from it?

If Solaris is based on BSD and has no SCO code in it, I guess that's not an issue. But then why did they take out a SCO license? I imagine some conspiracy theorists will say simply to hurt Linux, but that can't be the whole story, can it?

IBM had a SCO license too, but that's because AIX has SysV code in it. That's not the code they gave to Linux, but if they were to open-source all of AIX and pieces of SCO code migrated to Linux, that would be a problem, no?. So why not with Solaris too?

Re:Gentoo at work..

Like Mr. Rental!

Re:great news for people who don't have Sparcs

hah, maybe 5 years ago it was easy to convince management to buy Sun. Not anymore, paying twice the price for half the performance, with dreadful service/maintenance costs? No, mangement wants more Linux, more migrations to Linux, even for proprietary software like Oracle. What with 4 and 8 way Intel boxes whooping the ass of 24-way UltraSparc, it's a no-brainer.

Re:How long...

Who knows? Maybbe, just maybe, part of the agreement and $$$ between SCO and Sun was to free Sun of any future leagal threats because they were planning on doing this.

Sun has great technology, and has always been available and helpful to the user/developer community whenever they could.

-- When you think of how evil MicroSoft is, remember that they learned it from IBM.

Re:Ok, so I'm a n00b

You can't run DTrace on Solaris 9 and earlier; the kernel's incompatable.

-eventhorizon

Re:copyright license or attempt at humour?

It possibly means people attempting to claim code witten by others as their own.

-eventhorizon

Re:This will be great fo the BSDs and gor Solaris

You're mistaken, AC. OpenSolaris can co-opt BSD code, because the BSD license specifically allows anyone to use their code for any purpose -- simply put, the BSD license is compatible with any license, as long as credit is given. It's as free, in that respect, as you can get (without going public domain).

The BSDs, however, cannot use any of OpenSolaris' code, because you cannot relicense CDDL code as BSD (if you could, it would be trivial to put it into Linux -- after all, BSD licensed code may be added to the Linux kernel, and in fact has been on several occasions.)

The BSDs will benefit no more from OpenSolaris using their code than they do from NT using their code.

This is essentially how BSD works -- everyone benefits from BSD, but no one is required to give back. The BSD people don't see any issues with this, so more power to them.

Linux can't benefit from OpenSolaris either -- but because of the GPL, this means that OpenSolaris also can't benefit from Linux. So it's a symmetric relationship in that respect.

Re:Is it FSF approved?

they apply the same rules to licenses to be considered "open source" (OSI) or "free" (FSF).

the only difference is philosophy