14 DAY TRIAL // According to a recent post on Yahoo! News, Sun has serious intentions of releasing binaries for its OpenSolaris Unix platform by 2008 during a so called Project Indiana. As Ian Murdock, Sun's chief OS strategist and a former CTO of the Linux Foundation, mentioned, this movement comes as a way of increasing the market for Solaris.
" Over the last five or 10 years, orders of magnitude more people in the world know Linux environment than know Solaris. This is a problem ?" Murdock said. He also explained that "The main goal of Indiana is to reorient Solaris around the distribution model" . This means that Solaris would in a way mimic the Linux distributions model, having a commercial distro to offer to enterprises, but also a binary version for the developers interested in deploying and correcting possible mistakes in Solaris; Marc Hamilton, Sun vice president of marketing for the Solaris group, has also underlined the idea saying that the Indiana release would be used for one or two releases and then the user would move to the enterprise product over time. Hamilton also said he is impressed by the rapid adoption of Intel servers running Linux.
According to Murdock, the Indiana version should be easy to install and should benefit of network-based package management, and Solaris' famous ZFS (Zettabyte File System) as the default file system. He also mentioned that they expect developers to be interested in deploying Indiana in production environments where Sun considers selling support services for the products.
He also added that "There's very little compatibility between Linux distributions. While there is competition between Solaris and Linux, it is in the same sense as how Red Hat competes with Debian. Competition is a healthy thing in a free market?"
Analyst Tom Kucharvy, senior vice president at Ovum, considers this step as a smart movement on the part of Sun. He also added that he does not think that Sun tries to slow down Linux but to increase exposure for Solaris. However, such thing would be almost impossible as Linux is just "so established in so many markets".