Source: Sun To Release First Bits Of Open Solaris Tuesday

Sun is scheduled to hold a press conference Tuesday to show good faith and demonstrate its commitment to open source the bulk of Solaris 10 by making DTrace, or dynamic tracing utility, available under its newly approved Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

The CDDL, which received approval from the Open Source Initiative last week, is based on Mozilla Public License 1.1. The dynamic tracing utility, made available last March as a part of the company's Software Express program, is an innovation in Solaris 10 that monitors systems thresholds and helps customers prevent problems, trace problems and recover quickly after a failure or improve resource allocation.

As it unveils its OpenSolaris.org Web site and community next week, Sun also will discuss its aggressive plans to open source nearly all of the Solaris 10 code including kernel, libraries and commands, sources said. Sun, however, will not open source drivers and other Solaris intellectual property that the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor derived from third parties.

Only Solaris 10, not previous iterations of Solaris, will be available as open source, sources said. In addition to DTrace, other key Solaris 10 technologies in Open Solaris will include Trusted Containers and the Zetabyte File System. There also may be new technology in Open Solaris that does not appear in Solaris 10 as the community begins contributing to the project once DTrace is released next week, sources said.

However, as Sun gets set to formally make available Solaris 10 for download on Jan. 31, with the final DVDs scheduled to hit the channel March 7, Open Solaris will not be released for several months, after Sun completes an analysis of the millions of the lines of code in the Unix operating system, said a source who asked not to be named but who is familiar with the company's plans.

"The deal is to release virtually everything in Solaris," he said. "The delay is mostly the work and the need to go through all the source files, and [discover] who has copyright ownership. For a product that contains millions of lines of code and development over the past 22 years, there's a lot of history, a lot of archaeology."

Sun is hoping to have Open Solaris ready in the second calendar quarter but there's no firm availability date, the source said. N1 will not be part of Open Solaris, he added.

Sun stated its plans to open-source Solaris last June, and OpenSolaris was originally expected to be released by the end of 2004. Plans were stalled, however, when a debated raged within the highest levels of Sun about exactly how much of the OS should be open sourced. Sources said that disagreement has since been resolved.

Sources also noted that the Linux Application Environment (LAE), code-named Janus and designed to enable Linux applications to run natively on Solaris, will not be available in the first cut of the Solaris 10 operating system.