Welcome!

SAP Authors: Kevin Benedict, Kevin Jackson, Udayan Banerjee, Michael Sheehan, RealWire News Distribution

Related Topics: Linux, Java, Open Source

Linux: Article

JavaOne 2008: Sun Challenges Linux

Indiana is the Linux-friendly OpenSolaris Project Meant to Move the Solaris-shy Linux Community off Linux and on to Solaris
By Maureen O'Gara
Article Rating:
May 13, 2008 06:15 AM EDT
Reads:
 7,961

Sun’s mule train has finally pulled into Indiana after three years on the road.

Indiana is the Linux-friendly Fedora-like OpenSolaris project meant to move the Solaris-shy Linux community off Linux and on to Solaris tempted by Solaris widgetry like the highly scalable, rollback-easy, 128-bit ZFS default filesystem, Linux-like network-based Image Packaging System (IPS) application install accelerator, DTrace predictive self-healing and scalable Containers virtualization, not to mention its Gnome 2.22 front-end and built-in Firefox browser.

The OS, covering desktop, server and HPC in a single distribution, is now officially out and available to all comers as a free download from Sun or on the Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform, where it’s in invitation-only beta. Sun is offering free technical support. Amazon charges 10 cents a CPU-hour for EC2. (See www.sun.com/amazon.)

Sun, unprofitable again and looking at another layoff, is trying to encourage program development so it can sell more hardware and services. Conversely, Solaris’ bigger application portfolio makes it attractive.

Sun will support the so-called OpenSolaris 2008.5 for $49 an incident for developers up to $2,160 a system a year for customized configurations, prices Sun says are competitive with Red Hat.

Sun is also supporting MySQL on Linux and EC2 in the price of premium MySQL Enterprise subscription. And Zmanda, Thoughtworks, GigaSpaces and RightScale are supporting the EC2 push.

From here on out OpenSolaris, licensed under Sun’s Community development and Distribution (CDDL) license, is supposed to be upgraded every six months. Unlike the GPL, CDDL (say cuddle) allows mixing open source and proprietary code but can’t be used with GPL widgetry, obviously a problem in the open source world.

Sun claims 100,000 registered members of OpenSolaris.org. AMD and Intel are working with OpenSolaris to make sure things executes.

Published May 13, 2008 – Reads 7,961
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.