14 DAY TRIAL // Portland, Oregon was the host for the famous OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention) this year. Among the special guests who took word at this event there was also Sun's operating system chief and creator of Debian, Ian Murdock. Murdock was there to share a few details over Sun's "Project Indiana".
Project Indiana is an open-source venture that was set up in order to allow the community of Solaris users to influence and contribute to the future of the operating system. However, Murdock did not, as expected, bring too much new information regarding this project. It was already known that Sun plans to release the first OpenSolaris, called Solaris 11 (codenamed Nevada), under the Project Indiana somewhere in 2008. Ian Murdock didn't want to answer when exactly this distribution will ship. Sun has also recently added support for 2048 thread boxes to the Solaris 11 source code. To give an answer to those who claimed this release would be only a Linux copy, Murdock stated:
"It is not a Linux copy thing. It's a best of both worlds thing. We're adopting a model that moves into a two-tier release cycle where one option will be a fast moving, community version of Solaris for the early adopters. It's meant to make Solaris appeal to a broader audience."
Ian Murdock is known as the founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Currently, he is working for Sun Microsystems. He has also been working for the Linux Foundation as Chief Technology Officer and he was Chair of the Linux Standard Base, the Linux platform interoperability standard. Sun Microsystems is known as a vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information-technology services, founded in 1982, headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Sun is also known as the developer of innovative technologies such as the Java platform and NFS, and as a key promoter of open systems in general and UNIX in particular; it has recently emerged as one of the leading proponents and contributors of open source software.