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OpenSolaris: The View from Down Under One Year Out The Open Source Community Lines Up Solidly in Support
A year into the OpenSolaris Project, James Eagleton, Sun Solaris Project Manager for Australia and New Zealand, shared his thoughts with Renai LeMay for ZDNet Australia. The prospects, he said, are good. Without question, Eagleton assured LeMay, the open source community has been enthusiastic in its reception of OpenSolaris with more than 13,600 people signing up through the project's web site since June 2005. LeMay reports that project managers are still at work on the governance framework for OpenSolaris, though they have signed off on a charter document, and a community board has been appointed. Work continues on a detailed constitution, she wrote. "That's being worked on right now -- the community's all working on the constitution," said Eagleton, adding he thought the document would deal with any governance issues associated with the project. By year's end, all the aspects of the SolarisTM Operating System (Solaris OS) pertinent to the open source project should have been released, according to LeMay. A useful measure of the open source community's contributions to OpenSolaris, in Eagleton's view, is that non-Sun programmers have offered some 165 code contributions to the OpenSolaris project, 70 of which have been accepted into the project's code base and another 95 are currently in the review process. Eagleton is confident his company's initial moves have done much to increase developer interest in the platform, LeMay reports. "It was an accelerant -- like pouring kerosene on a fire," he told her in a telephone interview. "The level of interaction and discussion, and the level of innovation around Solaris has really taken off." The collaboration of Sun kernel engineer Alan Hargreaves and Andrew Tridgell on a Solaris-oriented bug fix for the popular Samba file sharing and printing suite at the recent LinuxWorld Australia Conference was evidence for Eagleton that fruitful interactions are taking place. "I could see these guys together on the stand, just working feverishly and really excitedly getting a lot out of working together," said Eagleton. "And that excitement's the type of thing that from the developers wouldn't have happened previous to us being able to open source Solaris." Peter Tribble, a UK-based systems administrator, expressed a similar degree of optimism about OpenSolaris in saying, "It's not just the code, although being able to see exactly what the source is doing can be very helpful when analyzing a problem. The really big thing is the community that allows direct interaction with the Sun engineers who designed and wrote the software we use," he told ZDNet Australia via e-mail. LeMay writes that Tribble said Solaris' new open nature meant system administrators like him could help guide the development of the operating system they relied upon. Tribble told LeMay there were a number of bite-sized bugs that new contributors could cut their teeth on, as a way to learn the process. "In more complex cases, the sponsor [a "buddy" within Sun] will offer coding suggestions, arrange code review, arrange for any tests that need to be run, and where there are changes to the way the code works, manage the ARC review [architectural review] process. All the time acting as a liaison with us contributors," he said. "There isn't really much of a management structure, at least not that I can see," he added. "Clearly Sun has huge input -- but that's only right, as it's their code to start with, and they're putting in most of the resources at the moment -- so we're not really self-governing yet."
"The project has -- in my view anyway -- been extremely successful in keeping to the original Solaris ethos while developing a strong OpenSolaris community," Tribble told LeMay.
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OpenSolaris: The View from Down Under One Year Out
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