Sun Solaris Joins the Open Source Wave

Sun Microsystems is the latest in joining Open Source Wave, as it annouced its plan to release the source code of Solaris for the developers. Solaris is now available to developers to contribute and to do whatever they want.

The initiative from the corporate may not be entirely selfless as Industry sees it as an effort to win back its lost market share from its competitors Red Hat and Microsoft.

The company will post more than 5 million lines of source code at the OpenSolaris Web site, containing kernel and networking code. The kernel includes features such as predictive self-healing and Solaris containers for isolating an application within the operating system. Also included in the release are system libraries and commands. Additional components, including installation and some administration tools, will be added later.

The OpenSolaris community includes a new source browser, build tools, documentation, a community portal, mailing lists and blogs. Developers can also follow technical conversations among Solaris engineers and the community on the long-term co-development model.

"The more people who run Unix and Solaris and open Solaris, the larger the opportunity is to sell the hardware, infrastructure and services necessary to put it into deployment," Schwartz said in a telephone interview.

"Open source doesn’t mean no revenue, it means no barriers to (growing) revenue," he added.

Solaris is one of the major versions of the Unix operating system used in heavy-duty computing environments, such as financial services, air traffic control, and other transaction-laden computer processes.

Solaris operates on Sun’s Sparc microprocessors as well as AMD’s Opteron server chips.

Sun additionally commented that the company has changed its strategy for a better future, and releasing the source code of Solaris is just the first step in making more changes to grow the company at a steady pace.

Sun said the source code for Solaris will be available on its website starting Tuesday.