Sun To Split Solaris Distribution Model

Sun Microsystems on Thursday said it is establishing a two-tier distribution model for its Solaris operating system in an attempt to capture market share from its Linux competitors.

Tentatively dubbed "Project Indiana," the distribution methodology is based on a network-based package management system that runs on a 6-month release cycle of the latest improvements. The packages could be contributed by Sun, the open source community, or individuals. Currently under development in the Sun-founded OpenSolaris community, the first release is due out in Spring of 2008. Sun said test releases would be made available beginning in Fall 2007. The enterprise-version of Solaris is expected to maintain its current, predictable, and long release cycle schedule.

"From a product standpoint, think of this as one Solaris with two distributions: One for enterprise and one for development," said Marc Hamilton, Sun VP of Solaris Marketing. While Solaris Express has been considered a successful distribution model, Hamilton noted its disadvantage is that it is only available to Sun's customers.

The project first came to light during the JavaOne conference in May 2007 just as Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and the commercial Linux distributor Progeny, was making his debut as Sun's Chief Operating Platforms Officer.

Coming from the Linux community, Murdock noted the difficulty developers had in moving applications between Linux and Solaris, despite their common ancestry. His stated goal now is to "bridge the familiarity" between the two operating systems to a point where Sun can make a compelling reason for developers and their bosses to structure applications based around Solaris even if they are currently running code over Linux operating systems like Red Hat or SuSE.

"Your average application these days is probably made with Ruby on Rails to run on Linux," Murdock said during a press briefing Thursday. "We at Sun would take a look at that and say to our customers, 'You should move that to Solaris.' When they say, 'Why?'... We can show them how things like DTrace [a code-testing tool in the operating system], which has special software designed for Ruby -- but not on Linux. We have to give them a unique compelling reason to make the shift."

While Sun's Solaris customers are formidable -- there are more than 8.7 million licenses of the operating system with about 70% of those licenses on x86-based non-Sun hardware -- the developer population somewhat pales with other open source communities, Hamilton and Murdock noted.

The company said it is hoping that adopting a familiar distribution model and offering unique features in Solaris such as binary compatibility and the ability to rollback to a previously known good state will help win the hearts and minds of developers.

Sun said it also plans to provide basic training, support, and developer programs for both distribution models and would welcome any company or partner that would like to do the same.

What is unknown at this point is what type of licensing model Sun will choose for the Solaris that is created under Project Indiana. While OpenSolaris is licensed under the open source CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), Hamilton and Murdock said that Sun has not made a decision on future licensing.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Linux creator Linus Torvalds have been publicly debating the future of open source licensing and how it relates to OpenSolaris and Linux. The two men differ on their opinion of the latest version of the GNU Public License, which puts specific restrictions on digital rights management.