OpenSolaris

Well, it’s out. OpenSol­ar­is, that is. I thought it would be fun to indulge in a little fake his­tor­ic­al writ­ing (or dream­ing, some of it really out there)…

Even the people in the middle of it all, those who came up with the idea of mak­ing Sol­ar­is open source, those who came up with the idea of launch­ing a major ini­ti­at­ive by blog­ging, did­n’t real­ise what an impact this would have on the world. Even now, 5 years later, we’re still dis­cov­er­ing nuances, still dis­cuss­ing wheth­er this product or that sys­tem could even have been con­tem­plated without the boost provided by the OpenSol­ar­is initiative.

So what was so new about this? Two things spring imme­di­ately to mind. This was the first time a major oper­at­ing sys­tem had moved from closed-source to open source. A num­ber of organ­iz­a­tions had made such a leap in the years imme­di­ately pri­or to OpenSol­ar­is, not­ably the Moz­illa Found­a­tion (which cre­ated the Fire­fox browser) but those were all applic­a­tions. Linux (the main oth­er open source oper­at­ing sys­tem) was open source from the begin­ning. The oth­er was the launch-by-blog­ging. Sun Microsys­tems was one of the first major com­pan­ies to truly embrace blog­ging by any employ­ee as a means not only to get inter­est­ing inform­a­tion out there, but to build com­munity, and we can now see (and this was inten­ded at the time) the blog­ging launch of OpenSol­ar­is as being a nat­ur­al part of that com­munity-build­ing pro­cess. The 132 Sun engin­eers who wrote 215 000 words to launch OpenSol­ar­is was seen as a dis­ap­point­ment at the time by some, as a tri­umph by oth­ers. It was clear that this was only the begin­ning of what would become a wave of launch-by-blog­ging mar­ket­ing that was copied widely and is a stand­ard part of any product launch today.

What was not expec­ted was the sheer speed at which non-Sun developers took the oppor­tun­ity to cre­ate end-user applic­a­tions. Up until the launch, Sol­ar­is was con­sidered a cor­por­ate oper­at­ing sys­tem. Sol­id, secure, but noth­ing fancy that would tempt a con­sumer to switch. There were few applic­a­tions cre­ated by third party developers; sev­er­al hard-work­ing cor­por­ate applic­a­tions but little of interest to oth­ers. But by the end of 2005 there was an explo­sion of applic­a­tions, some duplic­at­ing sim­il­ar work on the Linux plat­forms such as new desktops and ports of vari­ous pop­u­lar applic­a­tions, and some that were tailored to the OpenSol­ar­is oper­at­ing sys­tem, tak­ing advant­age of fea­tures that were not avail­able else­where. OpenSol­ar­is became the slash­dot­ter oper­at­ing sys­tem of choice, and reports star­ted com­ing in of com­pan­ies being deluged with requests to port their applic­a­tions to OpenSolaris. 

Now, 5 years after that fate­ful day, we see OpenSol­ar­is being used as the base of gam­ing con­soles, bank sys­tems, even mobile phones! Oth­er oper­at­ing sys­tem developers and vendors were inspired to improve their offer­ings, and the sta­bil­ity and secur­ity of all oper­at­ing sys­tems has increased to the stage where teen­agers don’t under­stand adult jokes about blue screens.

Ok, now back to real­ity. I use Sol­ar­is on my laptop so some of the above is my dream — more choice in Sol­ar­is-based oper­at­ing sys­tems and desktops (the Sol­ar­is equi­val­ent of Ubuntu, for example) and in applic­a­tions. There are lots of applic­a­tions avail­able for Linux (Skype, for example) that could be por­ted to Sol­ar­is with (I assume) rel­at­ively small effort. The basic things do work — brows­ing, edit­ing office doc­u­ments, email. I can even use punchin (though not in con­junc­tion with my Debi­an fire­wall, since I need to set up ipsec tables and that requires updat­ing to sarge, then recom­pil­ing the ker­nel, then fig­ur­ing out the magic incant­a­tions. If any­one is using punchin on a Sol­ar­is box behind a Debi­an fire­wall and has hints on the best way to tackle this, please let me know!). I like using Sol­ar­is, it feels sol­id and stable and although it’s been a long time since I worked on a Unix-based sys­tem, so I have to refresh my memory on how to do a lot of things, it’s good to have the choice.