Has the first year of the OpenSolaris Project been a success? There are some metrics available from sun.com that suggest that the answer is yes.

Consider the following:

• The OpenSolaris community has 14,000 members, with 29 user groups, 40 subcommunities, and 31 active projects
• There have been four OpenSolaris source code distributions - NexentaOS, SchilliX, BeleniX, and mart-UX - with two more in the works
• In Brazil, China and India, OpenSolaris project events have been massively over-subscribed, with especially high interest among education establishments
• In May 2006, the OpenSolaris project received the prestigious SIIA Codie award for Best Open Source Solution

As Sun executives explain it, "open source development enables the growth of an interdependent network of business opportunities around a particular technology. In this so-called ecosystem, all participants have a common interest in the quality and success of the platform."

"Sun believes that you can win without everybody else having to lose," says Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer and member of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB).

"We're adjusting Sun for the coming market, not the passing market. In the coming market, you will earn revenue when your customer derives value from your technology, not when they are acquiring it. At acquisition, the important thing will be to be as available as possible to developers and system administrators building the customer solution."

Last December this philosophy led Sun to make an entire platform of the SolarisTM Operating System (Solaris OS), the Sun JavaTM Enterprise System, developer tools, desktop infrastructure and the Sun N1TM management software all available for free as the SolarisTM Enterprise System.

OpenSolaris lends itself to use by developers in combination with such tools as the Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) feature, mdb and libumem, as well as Sun Studio software developer tools to create a powerful, flexible set of solutions for the development environment.

Among the community members are:

• Philips Medical Systems, which is participating in the OpenSolaris project community to produce device drivers for a PCI card.
• Rite Online Inc, whose president, Rich Teer, says, "It's an ideal base for businesses to build new products."
• NexentaOS distro developer Alex Ross chimes in, saying, "Solaris 10 is just the most secure, stable, scalable, reliable, and available operating system out there."

"The OpenSolaris community is growing in all directions at this point," says Jim Grisanzio, OpenSolaris community manager. People are starting projects, joining communities, engaging in discussions, creating distributions and ports, contributing code, and exploring opportunities. The passion is absolutely palpable." [...read more...]

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