After Oracle, OpenSolaris rises again

While some of the open source projects that Sun Microsystems created — and which I used to work with — have maintained a high profile, the one most associated with Sun in the minds of system administrators has been strangely forgotten. Whatever happened to OpenSolaris?

The OpenSolaris story illustrates a key value delivered by the liberties provided via open source. When your vendor changes direction, what do you do? Traditionally, you have five options:

1. Reimplement your system to use your vendor’s new strategy
2. Reimplement your system using a different vendor’s product 
3. Use your vendor’s locked-in support contract
4. Use an escrowed version of the source code (which you wisely demanded from your vendor during the original purchase) and engage specialists to carry on with your existing software at your own risk until it no longer works as the environment evolves
5. Proceed apace and hope nothing goes wrong

All of these are, to say the least, suboptimal. Most of the victims of vendor abandonment I’ve encountered have opted for one of the first two scenarios, some using either of the last two as a bridging strategy. All of them have found the experience very expensive.

While superficially appealing, the value of escrow as a safety measure is especially questionable today. It was a viable protection in the days where all the software on your computer was delivered on tape and compiled for your system. But now, with the best will in the world, the source code to a complex proprietary product won’t be easy to engage even with plenty of warning and resources, let alone in an emergency on an unmodified budget. Finding anyone sufficiently familiar with the source code to navigate — not to mention safely modify — it is very unlikely, and doing so on demand verges on the impossible.

With open source software, there’s a sixth option. As long as it’s real open source and not compromised in some way, the community around the free-software commons can rehost and carry on. They can step aside from the original project host and follow the vision they collectively believe in. This can be a fork — as it was for Jenkins and LibreOffice — or it can be a straightforward continuation of a discarded initiative, as in the case of Apache River (Jini) or, notably, the heirs of OpenSolaris.

Technology lives on

To be clear, the OpenSolaris name is no more. As is obvious from such sources as staff blogs, Oracle has no commitment to open source for what was formerly the OpenSolaris platform, and it stopped using the name almost as soon as it took control of Sun’s assets. While Oracle is willing to make available source code for a core subset of Solaris 11, it has no interest in delivering the full source or receiving anything more than bug reports from paying customers through formal channels. There’s no role for community in Oracle’s plans. Perhaps that’s a reason customers are deserting the company?

But this didn’t kill the community. Today, multiple initiatives continue to develop the code formerly known as OpenSolaris, enhancing it and building businesses around it. The cloud hosting company Joyent has created an operating system called SmartOS as the basis for its virtualization and storage environment. Networked storage vendor Nexenta has created NexentaStor, an open source, ZFS-based storage appliance operating system at the heart of its OpenStorage vision. OmniTI, an IT services and consulting company, has created a complete operating system called OmniOS, a delivery vehicle for DTrace and ZFS for Web stack solutions.

These initiatives are based on the operating system components sustained in the Illumos project, a fully open fork of what was OpenSolaris and now maintained by many of the same engineers whose creativity reanimated Solaris 10. Each of the special-purpose projects based in it contribute engineering talent to fix problems and innovate into Illumos. The result is a collaborative approach to open source that allows virtualization, cloud, and storage technologies to be created and sold without the need to pay “taxes” to a proprietary vendor.

Two key Solaris technologies are also showing up in other operating systems. ZFS is an extremely capable file system that allows disk resources to be flexibly virtualized into a pool, then used for highly fault-tolerant storage. It was ported to the BSD family of open source operating systems back in the days of Sun Microsystems and is still actively maintained, providing all the capabilities BTRFS aspires to deliver to Linux in the future. Meanwhile, DTrace is a performance analysis and troubleshooting tool included by default with various operating systems, including Solaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD; a Linux port is in development. It’s actively promoted by its original developers, who work at some of the companies mentioned above rather than at Oracle.

While the highly hyped OpenSolaris name is no more, the innovation it represented lives on in many businesses. The use of an OSI-approved open source license for OpenSolaris meant that, when a fork in the road appeared, the community was free to take it and build its own entrepreneurial future. This is what software freedom is all about: ensuring every community participant ultimately controls their own destiny rather relying on the goodwill of a vendor to determine it for them.

This article, “After Oracle, OpenSolaris rises again,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.