Sun: OpenSolaris not aimed at Linux

newsmaker By making its cherished Solaris operating system open-source, Sun Microsystems has taken a huge step forward in a bid to recover its former shine during the late 90s.

While some may see OpenSolaris as Sun's attempt to fend off its traditional rivals, Matt Thompson, the company's director of technology outreach and open source programs, begs to differ.

In an exclusive interview with ZDNet Asia, Thompson explains that OpenSolaris was never aimed at Linux. In fact, he is glad when developers choose to program on Linux because the dominant programming language used on Linux is Sun's Java.

The company also recently started an office dedicated to and responsible for coordinating all open-source activities. The office encompasses an open-source council that has representatives from Thompson's team, the product teams, the CTO (chief technology officer) group, and several other executives who drive our open-source strategy.

Q: What are the challenges in promoting open source adoption in Asia?
A: It breaks down into different factors. One is the economic factor.

For countries sensitive to high prices, any increase in cost to them will cause a slowdown in infrastructure build-out or adoption. In places like the Philippines and Vietnam, and to some extent, Thailand, open source is the de facto standard for all new projects as they believe the cost will be less than having to buy software.

One of the things that we've been doing is to educate people that open source is never free. In the case where countries adopt open source strictly based on cost, they are missing out in calculating the additional cost that will come in.

In other countries like Singapore, India, China, Japan and Korea, we are seeing companies taking a much more careful look at what open source provides, and the adoption of things that will add value to the (open source) ecosystem and commoditize the infrastructure. For example, Sun recently open-sourced our base-level application server, which is very useful to places like these countries because application servers are part of the infrastructure now. It's not something that differentiates value.

The developer side is more interesting. Developing software is still a form of creativity. The process of building software is a lot like art--you're not sure if you're done even when you're done. And so, the concept of open source accelerates the creation process because the barrier to entry is only how fast developers can learn. That's always been an interesting challenge to developers.

Many see OpenSolaris as a move to fend off rivals Red Hat, IBM and Microsoft. Is that true?
When we did OpenSolaris, we were definitely not aiming at Linux. We look at Linux as another variant of Unix. We see Solaris and most of the Linux distributions as peers. The Linux movement is something that I want to see more of.

There's data from Evans Research Corporation that looks at which platforms developers are coding on. Over the last four years, the percentage of developers that sit on Microsoft primarily has come down. It's still above 90 percent, but it has come down. All of that has moved to Linux, and I'd like to see more of this.

The more developers who move to Linux, the happier I am because the number one language used on Linux for (software) development is Java. I want them all off Microsoft. With regard to OpenSolaris, when you look at the different distributions, one of the things we realized very quickly was that Red Hat was clearly getting a dominant position in the market.

So from an operating system perspective, we are competing against HP-UX and AIX, and to some extent we are competing against Red Hat as well, not against Linux, but against the Red Hat corporate entity.

When you look at OpenSolaris, it's very much about reinvigorating a developer community around the Solaris technology, just as they have in a borrowed fashion around Linux.

Today, you can't as a community, do a put-back into the Red Hat distribution. They have Fedora, and they will pick and choose which pieces they want out of that project. We've offered a much different value proposition. Our Solaris engineers are spending time in the community daily, looking at ideas, engaging in forums, blogging, and taking part in different wikis to develop the next version of Solaris.

And when we do our weekly builds for the next version of Solaris, it's out of the source codes that come from OpenSolaris. It's not a separate source tree where you people over there do your open thing, while we do our private thing over here. That's what Red Hat does.

We're saying that we are completely open. You tell us what to do and help us do that, and we're going to build the next generation software after that. It's about reinvigorating the community and innovation.

Jonathan Schwartz had criticized the General Public License (GPL) earlier on, and said that it amounts to economic imperialism. What are your thoughts on that?
He got a lot of quotes from that one talk! I actually helped him write that speech too.

There are 32 different open source licenses, all hosted and approved by the OSI (Open Source Initiative). The challenge we have is that each of these licenses has very subtle differences.

There are a couple of components to open source that OSI looks for before approving a license. They are free access to source codes, no discrimination against any group or entity, and the ability to derive works from open source projects. Beyond that, it says nothing about legal protection for the user.

The GPL states that any software brought into a GPL-based project must also inherit the terms of the GPL. The license has a viral effect and this ability to move forward with the code that is protected by the GPL. I'll give you a simple example of why that does not work for many open source projects.

Let's say you are a government working on software used in homeland security. If you use open-source software under the GPL to build that infrastructure, you have to give that source code away. That is the most ridiculous thing, and it makes no sense. How can I protect my country and borders, if I have to give my source codes away?

There needs to be a number of licenses that allow the open source community working to keep certain codes they need. We released OpenSolaris with a license called Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)--it does not carry that same viral property as the GPL. You can choose to use the CDDL license, and derive a work from source codes without having to carry that license forward. Companies and governments need to have some protection for their technology. It's not intellectual property protectionism, but security protectionism.

Sun's reason for not allowing Java to be open-source is the fear of creating incompatible versions of the programming language. An analyst suggested a better approach would be to release control of the Java source code, and fix the compatibility problem by permitting the use of the Java brand only with compatible versions. Do you think that will work?
That is a very interesting suggestion, and we've had the same discussion within Sun. There was a debate at Java One two years ago. The general feeling at the end of it was that might be the way forward.

The value of the brand is compatibility. So would it be okay to release the source code, have people do something that would not allow it to be compatible, and not let the branding go forward? Right now, when we talk to people who rely on Java in their businesses, they are telling us not to release the source codes. They don't want the added confusion. They don't want Java to look like Linux.

Microsoft has recently been marketing aggressively in Singapore to tout the benefits of Windows over Linux. Do you think it's going to affect how people see the software behemoth and open-source?
Microsoft's ability to influence the IT community in Singapore is infamous. Singapore is a very high-tech country. Singaporeans adopt technology faster than almost any country I've seen in the world. That has played into Microsoft's hands.

Microsoft's 'Get the Facts' program is absolutely full of garbage. They do not go into the details of looking at a single distribution of Linux and saying if I adopt this single distribution and build on top of it, what are the real costs? Instead, it's about Linux in general.

But rather than arguing whether the program is real or not, we have a more specific answer. Solaris is free and supported. Just use that instead. Microsoft can't use that campaign against Solaris.

But Sun lately seems to be taking a less adversarial stand toward its computing rivals like Microsoft and IBM. Why is that?

Going back almost a year, we embarked on a business and technology relationship with Microsoft. That was based on the outcome of a long-running trial. In the end, it wasn't about Microsoft saying that both parties should settle this and move on. Rather, our customers were telling us if we want to be in the enterprise space, we have to work with Microsoft's technology.

But that's not saying that we are playing nice in the media, and not battling out behind the scenes because we still compete. My job is still to get as many developers on the planet to adopt Java. And if I could, I would to speak to every Visual Basic and .Net developer and ask them to use Java instead.

We realized that we could collaborate with Microsoft on the infrastructure side. If you look at Web services specifically, it was obvious to our customers that if we found a way to collaborate, they could build one infrastructure that supports both Sun and Microsoft development frameworks and save money. The first example of this is the ability to do single sign-on from a .Net or Java application.

We are now looking to extend interoperability between J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and the .Net framework. There is tremendous amount of work going on in Web services. I can't pre-announce anything but we have engineering teams working directly with Microsoft to make Web services interoperability a key part of our strategy this year.

On the IBM side, I think it's more of IBM realizing that the Java platform is important to them and the larger community. What they did was to rev up their support for the Java platform. They've always been a member of the Java Community Process, and all they did was to commit to do so for another 10 years.

Some analysts noted that sharing control with external programmers will be a crucial success factor for OpenSolaris. Will it be possible for developers to contribute a patch and have that patch rewritten by someone more experienced at Sun?
For OpenSolaris, that's absolutely possible.

In the open-source community, it's important to understand that there are roles undertaken by different people. In the Linux space, it'll be the guru hackers. In OpenSolaris, we are looking at people to have more responsibility within the community as they build their knowledge.

On the advisory board, which decides the governance model for OpenSolaris, we have outside people who are not Sun employees. That says a lot about how people can interact with the source codes. In the software space, we are training outside developers to contribute to the OpenSolaris source codes directly.

There is an education process. What we want to do is to engage the community to learn about OpenSolaris. You have to show your ability, know the Sun community, and when you become a trusted entity, those kinds of (contribution) opportunities will become available.

Sun has cooled down its Linux desktop plans of late. What's with the about-turn?
The Sun Java Desktop System (JDS) was a user model with a bunch of utilities, and it works on top of other operating systems. There were even discussions to put JDS on Windows.

JDS was on Linux initially, and that was cooled because we wanted to focus our resources on making sure than JDS on Solaris is a good solution. But if you want JDS on Linux, we do offer it through Sun Ray, which runs on Linux.

We also looked at offering JDS on top of Red Hat, SuSE, Debian and so on, but there wasn't much interest from the market. When people decide to buy a solution and want a user environment that makes sense, that's where JDS fits in.