SDA: What is the driving factor behind Sun’s decision to release Solaris as an open source operating system?
Simon Phipps: Several different factors affected that decision. We believe that any complex piece of software in the future is better developed by community. Consequently, the way to take any large piece of complex software is almost certainly in the direction of the community. We have already done that with the development tools and created the NetBeans community. The next step for us is to do the same with Solaris, and create the OpenSolaris community. You can expect to see a continued progress towards that complex software base being taken to open source. In terms of the benefits that exist, there is already a huge community around Solaris, and OpenSolaris allows us to let that community participate in the software they depend on. We believe that after that will come new uses that Sun could never think of for Solaris. I am particularly expecting in embedded software, and also for it to be widely used in education. We have a global pilot community that we have been working with over the last nine months around OpenSolaris. Within that pilot community, there are three groups of people who are planning to produce independent distributions of Unix based on OpenSolaris. Hence, as well as Solaris from Sun, there would also be other Unix distributions based on the OpenSolaris community. That naturally means that we now not only have Sun engineers working on Solaris, but also all these other engineers working on innovations and quality.
SDA: With OpenSolaris, does Sun hope to gain a portion of the market lost to Linux?
SP: No, I do not think that is true. I have been involved with the Solaris team now for a year. Really, they almost never mention them. The fact is, Solaris is part of a 24-year heritage of Sun, and our move to OpenSolaris is about empowering that community. Now over time, yes, I do actually see customers moving from Linux to Solaris because Solaris has got innovations that will not show up in Linux for quite some time. However, OpenSolaris is not in any way related to Linux. It is actually about empowering the Solaris community, and taking Solaris into the participation age. It is not about doing something against anyone else.
SDA: How do you position OpenSolaris relative to Linux?
SP: It is another open source community like FreeBSD, NetBSD and Linux. There are actually many open source operating system communities out there, and OpenSolaris is another such community. If you look at those open source operating system communities, they are all independent to each other and only compete in the smallest sense. The FreeBSD for example, is a very widely used open source Unix operating system. People never talk about it competing with Linux. There is a community that uses FreeBSD, one that uses Linux, and another that uses Solaris. We are expecting that community to approach the source of the software they depend on in their hands to be empowered to help it evolve. It is really nothing to do with Linux. Obviously, Sun is interested in helping its customers use the software that is best for them. We are committed to helping customers succeed whatever their choice of operating systems. This is not actually about hurting something, but helping existing community to have their future in their own hands.
SDA: You mentioned that you see Linux users migrating to OpenSolaris. Which group of users do you see adopting OpenSolaris the most readily?
SP: Personally, I would not say that I see a lot of Linux users migrating. We have already seen some of our customers who decided to use Linux instead of Solaris coming back again. They decided that Linux looks great, but actually, Solaris fits their needs better. If you are running a data centre, Solaris 10 is a much better operating system to use than Linux, in particular because of DTrace that keeps your systems running at peak performance. The Solaris Containers lets you use your surplus processor capacity to run extra copies of Solaris. With SMF, which is the install and self-healing system, you can keep your uptime to a maximum and makes installation easy. Those three innovations are each in themselves why customers feel it is worth moving to Solaris again. I am an open source person so I know that these things go in waves. There will come a point where Linux is going to get some of this buzz, then Solaris will lead ahead of that again, and Linux will come forth of that. I am not suggesting that there is a big migration.
SDA: Since the announcement of the initiative from Sun, there have been countless misconceptions and misunderstandings about OpenSolaris. In your opinion, what is the most commonly misunderstood idea about OpenSolaris?
SP: Probably the most common problem with open source in general is, people say you are giving this away, how would you ever make money. When people ask that question, it shows that they have not understood open source. Open source is about creating shared software that software experts used to create wealth. People who are using Solaris 10 will see no difference between yesterday and tomorrow because they will continue to have a high performance, highly stable, reliable, secure operating system which is supported by Sun. They will continue to pay Sun for the service to keep it running. We will continue to make money from Solaris. Just because the code is gone to the open source community base for development does not change the fact that we would help customers to run their business and they will pay us for the help that we give them. We are going to make money by providing valuable product and service that customers want to pay for.
SDA: Are you confident that OpenSolaris is able to generate the following that Linux has accumulated?
SP: I am very confident because OpenSolaris is not started new from nothing. We have been running a pilot community now on OpenSolaris for the last nine months. It has been oversubscribed by about three times. We have over million downloads of Solaris 10 so far. Every one of those downloads is a potential member of the community. We have many ISVs who are already part of the Solaris community, and would want to be part of the OpenSolaris community. Hence, my view of the OpenSolaris community is, we are actually empowering an existing community, whereas the Linux community has grown layer by layer. OpenSolaris is going to have millions of people around the world who are already using it, and are potentially part of the OpenSolaris development community.
SDA: Being both open source operating system, people tend to compare OpenSolaris and Linux. How do you address this?
SP: Often, people asked a question that is based on misunderstanding. For example, OpenSolaris is not an operating system. OpenSolaris is an open source code community and Solaris is an operating system. We build Solaris from OpenSolaris. On the other hand, Linux is not an operating system, it is actually the name of a kernel. It is one of the components within a family of components that gets assembled by organisations like Red Hat, SuSE, Debian to produce operating system distributions. To do a comparision, you will have to pick things you are going to compare. You are going to compare Solaris 10 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux? I can do a feature by feature comparison. However, when it comes to the open source community, there is no comparison. There are loosely defined community individuals and corporate employees who are maintaining the code they need to make a living. In that sense, they are very much the same thing. Therefore, the Sun engineers who work on Mozilla, for example, are helping the same Mozilla which is in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The guys at Sun who work on Gnome are the same guys who work on the Gnome desktop for different Linux distribution systems. Actually, it is the same community in certain cases. The comparison questions are between commercial output on the communities.
SDA: How do you see the relationship between OpenSolaris and Linux?
SP: They are both operating systems that people can use on servers. Linux is an original source code base created by Linux Torvalds. Solaris is real Unix. All the comparisons that get the media excited are marketing comparisons, and I do not do that.
SDA: How near or far in the future do you see the OpenSolaris community mature?
SP: If you look at any open source community, it is a source commons being used by artisans to create wealth. This artisan community here already consists of a very large number of Sun engineers and they are all part of the community. On opening day, the community comes with a 4-figure number of engineers who are working in that community. Hence, on opening day itself, the community is already matured. What will change over time is that we would gradually see more and more people who do not work for Sun taking responsibility in that community. I believe that is a gradual process that may take two years to see external people taking responsibility in that community. However, this is different from an open source community like Linux, where Linux Torvalds is still really in control. If you look at the source code of Linux, you will find there are very few people who actually commit and make their changes back to the Linux kernel. There are many thousands of people who suggest them, but only very few actually commit code back. Solaris, I think, will evolve into a very broad community of people who have committed to the release. There is an engineer taking responsibility for every single part of Solaris. My role as a member of the community advisory board is to create a governance that makes sure that control will actually get shared. My objective is to take that community and make it a diverse global community instead of all Sun employees. That would certainly take time. My guess, is that is going to take anywhere from 18 months to 2 years.
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