Sun recently convened an Open Source Worldwide Panel hosted by Ian Murdock, the company's chief operating systems platform strategist, and including panelists such as Joe George, OpenSolaris user group leader in Bangalore, India; Gill Gravier, Geneva-based security vision and strategy spokesperson; Suvendu Ray, of Sun's open source engineering team in Bangalore; Bruno Souza, WorldWide NetBeans community manager for Sun; Susy Struble, expert in interoperability and IT standardization for Sun's Global Government Stragegy Group in the U.S., and Brad Vaughan, lead technologist in Sun's Software Services Group. Podtech recorded the proceedings, which is available in a 48-minute video.

A second panel, consisting of Murdock, Josh Berkus, the project lead for PostgreSQL, Mark Reinhold, chief engineer for the Java SE platform and a lead engineer for OpenJDK, and Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer, considered the Open Source Roadmap, which Andy Patrizio covered for Internetnews.com.

Murdock, creator of the Debian Linux distribution back in the 1990s, said his very presence at Sun demonstrated the company's openness to Linux. "There's a broad perception that Sun is anti-Linux or competes with Linux, and that's not true," said Murdock. "So to have someone with a broad Linux background come into Sun made sense."

Murdock's Project Indiana is aimed at giving OpenSolaris a more efficient method to update code and is intended to lower the barrier for Linux users to adopt it. Paul Krill reported in Tech Watch that OpenSolaris would be available for developer preview at opensolaris.org by early November. With both OpenSolaris and Project Indiana, Krill reports, "Sun is attempting to make its Solaris OS more like Linux in areas such as packaging. A binary release of Solaris will be featured, as will the ability to upgrade a system on the fly just like Linux offers."

Murdock did emphasize that Sun's Image Package System (IPS) filled a significant gap in such solutions as Yum and App-Get in that, with IPS users can rollback an installation when there is a problem. IPS will also update a Solaris installation with new code, check for dependencies and download that code and install it. The final version of IPS is scheduled for release in approximately December or January.

Berkus reported that Sun is busily focusing on high availability, improved performance and ZFS integration for Postgre SQL, having identified a worldwide lack of support for training and knowledge as the principal problem impeding adoption of the solution.

An impediment to the open sourcing of Java, according to Mark Reinhold, is that Sun does not own all the code so it is currently involved in developing replacements for those elements, such as versions of the font rasterizer done, a cryptography component and the graphics rasterizer. In addition, Reinhold reported that the OpenJDK governance board hopes to have a constitution available for review and ratification in 2008.

Writing in eWeek, Peter Galli reports on Sun's hopes for a burgeoning Java OpenJDK project in the coming year. According to Mark Reinhold, roughly 96 percent of the JDK code has been shipped in source form, along with some binary plugs for the other 4 percent, though Sun does not have the rights to make that code available.

Simon Phipps added that Sun will not, for the moment, identify those entities that will not open their code but added that Sun is studying a switch to a new source code management system under which outside contributors who have proved themselves can have more freedom with regard to submitting code and making changes.

The direction for OpenJDK, Reinhold noted, is to have a draft constitution written and ready for review by the end of the year and ratified sometime early next year. [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter