Sun's Ian Murdock gave a presentation about OpenSolaris at LugRadio Live this past weekend. He explained how OpenSolaris reflects Sun's changing platform strategy and also discussed some of the technical attributes that differentiate OpenSolaris from Linux.
Murdock explained that Sun's traditional strengths in the enterprise are being overshadowed by significant changes in the market and in software adoption processes. He pointed out that much of the success that Linux has enjoyed in the server room is a result of its increasing popularity on the desktop among system administrators and other IT specialists. This is because people tend to deploy the technologies that are most accessible to them, he argues.
"Solaris is a tremendously successful operating system [that] does very well in a top-down deployment scenario," Murdock said, "[but] the market is fundamentally changing... a whole new market [is] emerging that has much more of a bottom-up structure, and that's basically how Linux got into the enterprise."
Sun aims to accommodate the bottom-up model by "breaking down the monolithic structure around Solaris" and making it more accessible to end users. He hopes to expose open source enthusiasts to unique Sun technologies by creating a cohesive distribution that will provide a complete environment that is adequate for day-to-day use. This will involve bringing together the Solaris operating system and a diverse assortment of open source community projects and "adding a package management system to hold all these pieces together," Murdock stated.
The first steps towards this goal have been realized in the latest developer preview release of OpenSolaris which offers a complete GNOME desktop environment as well as a package system and an installer. The final release will take place in May and the distribution will adhere to a six-month release cycle, just like Fedora and Ubuntu.
Ian Murdock at LugRadio Live
Murdoch spent a bit of time talking about some of the differentiating advantages of Solaris and how these will be leveraged in OpenSolaris to provide a better desktop experience. Special features of Sun's highly sophisticated ZFS filesystem, for instance, are used to implement rollback support for package management.
A message better suited for Wall Street than OSS enthusiasts
A rather tedious portion of the presentation was devoted to explaining Sun's OpenSolaris business strategy, which revolves around providing commercial support on top of OpenSolaris. The point of creating a distribution, says Murdock, is to promote widespread adoption so that Sun can reach the open source community through massive volume and then reap the rewards later when some of those adopters decide that they want commercial support services and help building out bigger infrastructure. "We can help you scale that basic deployment and take your business to the next level."
Ian Murdock is an excellent public speaker and handled the presentation well, but it suffered from some serious thematic weaknesses. The detailed explanation of how Sun intends to turn community adoption into cash in order to make up for marketshare lost to Linux is a message that is a lot more appropriate for Wall Street than for a room full of Linux enthusiasts at a community-driven event.
When OpenSolaris launches in May, it will start out with a significant disadvantage compared to Linux on the desktop because it doesn't have the same level of desktop hardware support yet or as big of a packaging community as the major desktop Linux distributions. It will have to make up for those deficiencies by offering value in other places. What I would like to hear instead of the business strategy specifics are some compelling reasons why I should consider adopting OpenSolaris. Only a few of these—like the ability to use ZFS for package rollbacks—were mentioned during the presentation.
As a Linux enthusiast, I'm convinced that competition from a robust OpenSolaris ecosystem will strengthen and enrich both platforms. There is a lot that the communities can learn from each other. Sun's presence and involvement at the event reflects a positive effort by the company to reach out to the Linux community, but I think that the message could have been better.
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