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Forms OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board
As part of its plan to make OpenSolaris –
well – Open, Sun has formed an advisory board to steward the
evolution of the OpenSolaris community toward self-governance.
Two members were nominated and elected by the community (Al
Hopper of Logical Approach and Rich Teer, an independent Solaris
consultant). The other
three members of the OpenSolaris Advisory Board are closer to Sun
(Roy Fielding, Day Software and co-founder of the Apache Software
Foundation, Simon Phipps and Casper Dik of Sun).
Sun
says it will release buildable source code for the Solaris 10
operating system under the CDDL open source license (Sun’s own
version) in the second quarter of 2005.
On the
one hand, we want to applaud Sun for taking this step in making
Solaris 10 available under an Open Source license.
On the other hand, as we have frequently noted in the past,
as long as the vendor continues to own the code and control its
future versions, we’re not sure it meets the expectations of the
Open Source community – or of users – of what Open Source is
meant to be. Of course,
SOMEONE has to make the final decision as to what goes into a new
version of an operating system and what stays out.
But when multiple competitors choose to rely on, say, Linux,
they know that it’s not a competitor making that decision, as it
would be with Solaris.
Nevertheless,
this is progress and we are looking forward to JavaOne this month
where we are certain we will hear about progress in OpenSolaris.
Sun And Its “Best” Customers
We
wanted to note that Sun has had another of its special events for
its best customers. This
was in Washington D.C. for federal government customers and it was
great fun to attend and watch Sun enjoy its good relationships with
the government systems integrators they partner with and to meet
some of their federal customers.
(We also attended a previous event last year in New York City
for financial services customers. In both cases, the idea is to show what Sun has for these
customers, many of whom have existing relationships with Sun, with
the hope of convincing them to open their pockets.)
Sun
used this occasion to make many announcements, including:
- Sun
Connection, a new service to be delivered as part of Sun’s
Grid strategy, which provides updates, patches, and technical
advice to customers directly.
It is being added to customers on Sun’s various support
plans at no additional cost. This was part of a general emphasis on the Sun Grid,
including Sun’s ability to provide computing and storage at $1
per unit. (In fact,
Sun CEO Scott McNealy started off the event by batting out balls
into the audience, each of which could be redeemed for 100 hours
of Grid based service.)
-
Sun offered updates to its N1 System Manager, starting with Sun’s x64
servers and eventually including additional systems as well as the
latest version of the Sun N1 Service Provisioning System, which can
provision a system from the bare metal to Enterprise Edition J2EE
application servers, Web servers, and databases.
This is good news because in April Sun downsized its N1 plans,
simply deciding that it would roll out on Sun platforms first and
extend to other platforms over time.
This is realistic, given that customers need to know just
what they can actually expect to be able to buy.
Every systems vendor will ultimately offer cross-platform
systems management, including provisioning and virtualization, but
delivering is going to take a while, we suspect.
