The ostensible confusion within Sun over the relationship between its first-born Solaris and sibling-rival Linux won’t be cleared up by the open source license it submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI). In the months leading up to the Solaris 10 release Sun execs made it clear that this iteration of the operating system would be available as open source software. But the company never completely explained how it planned to make that happen. Late in the day yesterday reports began circulating that Sun had composed an open source license of its own, the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), and submitted that draft to the OSI. The CDDL, Sun reportedly said, was constructed in a fashion that files will not be interchangeable with the General Public License (GPL). So in essence Sun is protecting Solaris which makes sense, though the confusion surrounding the relationship between Solaris and Linux is not any clearer. I was posting a blog yesterday written by Paul Krill about the pact Sun inked with Microsoft which contained a quote from Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos. So I went to Sun’s Web site to see if Papadopoulos has his own blog that I could link to, as several Sun execs do. Instead, what I found was his list of predictions for 2004. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the online teaser leading to his predictions piece said that 2004 would be, in Sun’s words now, the year that we would see the virtual disappearance of operating systems. The following five paragraphs appeared in Papadopoulos’ Executive Perspective which, by the by, was also published in Computerworld on December 18, 2003. On the software side, 2004 will be the year we finally end our fixation with operating systems. Linux will certainly continue to make news, but it has quickly consolidated around two offerings — Red Hat and SuSE — and each will reinforce its own portfolio of third-party software vendors, reminiscent of the old Unix wars. All of that is just a distraction. The real focus should be, and in many ways already is, higher up the software stack. The new developer contract — the set of software components program-mers must be able to count on when creating applications and services — goes well beyond the operating system. The network file system, directory, application server — all the things we think of as middleware today — will be part of the common base platform developers write to. They’ll no longer need to concern themselves with the next layer down, the operating system. The big benefit is that as the developer contract becomes codified through-out the industry, it should be just as easy to create a large-scale, Net-based service as it has been to create a single shrink-wrapped application for a stand-alone system. This will be welcome news for IT managers eager to move from infrastructure (spending money) to services (making money) as quickly as possible. To be fair, most everything in that excerpt holds some truth, particularly about how developers ought to be concentrating higher up the stack. That is happening to an extent and it should and will continue. He’s right, too. It will be a great day for IT managers when their programmers no longer have to concern themselves with the OS layer — when that day happens. But with 28 days left in 2004, I believe it can safely be said that day will not come this year. Eleven months later and Sun’s November launch of Solaris 10 stands to prove that Papadopoulos’ prediction about the OS no longer being a focal point was, or at least became, antithetical to the way Sun would approach Solaris 10 during 2004. During that week in November, I quoted John Loiacono, executive vice president, Sun’s software group in a story about Solaris 10 co-written with my colleague Ed Scannell. “The big thing is that the OS matters again,” Loiacona said in an inerview for the article.Furthermore, with the CDDL Sun is acting to protect Solaris, thereby validating the importance of the operating system. Any pragmatist knows that market conditions can change enough in one year’s time that companies have to trim their sails and readjust course just to avoid the impending swells, so I don’t fault Sun or Papadopoulos for last year’s predictions. In fact, I applaud the open sourcing of Solaris, so long as Sun gets the licensing right because if they don’t then version 10 could be Solaris’ last stand. Technology Industry