✭ Will Illumos Bring OpenSolaris Back To Life?

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Simon Phipps

Illumos tape graphic

Today sees the launch of the Illumos Project, heralded last week in a message on the OpenSolaris mailing lists. The announcement caused much excitement, with many assuming it was a fork of OpenSolaris or another OpenSolaris distribution.

Illumos is neither. It is in fact a project to create a fully open-source-licensed version of the Solaris operating system and networking consolidation – the closest Solaris comes to a “kernel project”. It’s a downstream open source project, happy to contribute upstream but resolutely independent. As such it is a thoroughly good thing and a breath of fresh air.

It’s a good thing because it unblocks the potential of the OpenSolaris community to have a fully open source free software commons at its heart and creates the possibility of a new operating system that carries forward the legacy of UNIX yet is fully independent. The founders have already worked hard to create a bootable version of ON, including rewrites of closed portions of libc and the most critical utilities and drivers. Now the project is launched, they are looking for participants who will work on the lock manager, crypto, labeld and on remaining drivers. As I’ve written before, open, multi-party communities are the key to the future of open source.

It’s a breath of fresh air because after half a year of stonewalling and silence from Oracle from everyone in a position to carry OpenSolaris forward, the conversation in the community had spiraled lower and lower from concern to conjecture to complaint and finally beyond into ad hominem. Indeed, project founder Garrett D’Amore told me he played it quietly up until now as there was too much complaining and not enough getting-things-done. He wanted there to be actual code available on opening day and not just promises.

It’s clearly beyond just promises. As well as all the new code, the new project is supported by key OpenSolaris community vendors and members. Storage appliance vendors Nexenta – who employ Garrett – have their own OpenSolaris distribution along with a growing staff of former Sun engineers to support it, and have committed to using Illumos. Cloud hosting company Joyent – whose recent hire of DTrace co-inventor Bryan Cantrill (who has also written about Illumos) signals a positive engagement with the technology – use OpenSolaris in production. That support, along with the other positive support from respected Solaris and OpenSolaris leaders, means Illumos could well be the restart OpenSolaris needed, as long as its founders can deliver on the promise.

I’ve seen a project like this succeed before. When the OpenJDK project was announced to deliver an open source Java platform, members of the existing open source Classpath community were delighted but remained concerned Sun would not make a priority of getting the remaining closed portions replaced. The community started the IcedTea project, a fully Free downstream of OpenJDK, and offered to contribute everything upstream. It was that action that meant OpenJDK soon became a fully open source project with all Free software in it.

Illumos has similarly invited Oracle to participate or even just to accept upstream the rework done by the Illumos project. Time will tell whether Oracle responds positively or whether Illumos becomes the new, independent heart of the former OpenSolaris community. Either way, count me among its fans!

[First published on ComputerWorldUK]

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✭ Is the “Open Source Bubble” Over?

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Simon Phipps

I was pleased to be able to attend this year’s OSCON, O’Reilly Media’s open source convention held once again in Portland, Oregon in mid-July. There have been numerous reports about it, not least from the New York Times, but one that caught my eye was the meta-analysis from analyst Stephen O’Grady. O’Grady is characteristically detail-rich and his article is packed with Google Trends graphs, but this quote is key:

The business of selling open source software, remember, is dwarfed by the business of using open source software to produce and sell other services. And yet historically, most of the focus on open source software has accrued to those who sold it. Today, attention and traction is shifting to those who are not in the business of selling software, but rather share their assets via a variety of open source mechanisms.

If we look back to Eric Raymond’s seminal essay The Cathedral and The Bazaar, the model behind open source is clear; an open community gathered around a free software commons, with each participant “scratching their own itch”. But it’s clear we’ve forgotten this, to the point of delusional false conclusions based on partial insight. The enduring popularity of the false question “if you give it away free, how do you make money” shows that the echoes of the Cathedral model ring on long after we’ve realised that the Bazaar model is the one that works in the meshed era of the Internet.

Why is that? O’Grady seems to imply there’s novelty here:

The difference this time around is that by sharing the code developed internally as open source, it becomes possible to amortize the development costs across multiple organizations with similar needs.

But I believe that is a rediscovery, not an innovation. The anomaly is not that projects like Hadoop or OpenStack lack a company “monetising” them – it’s that we believe open source projects ought to have such a company. The past decade has been something of an “open source bubble”, with many people believing there is a fortune to be made if only they can find the right business model to pack around open source.

But that thinking has usually involved a compromise of one of the key qualities that make open source work. Usually it’s a desire for control or exclusivity in some form, but the outcome is always to progressively negate the “open source effect” in search of profit, by limiting the ability of every participant to get what they want and thus give what they can. While there’s clearly a niche for one or two expertly-balanced businesses, the propensity of commentators to focus on these colourful exceptions has created the perception this is the norm.

That anomalous decade is just about over. The new projects on the block are once again collaborative, seeded by companies whose business does not depend on selling the software or its direct derivatives. They involve synchronizing fragments of the interests of many, diverse participants rather than having the whole of a single party’s interests at their core. Every participant comes to them paying their own way rather than expecting the project to pay them.

They aren’t really new, either. They are a continuation of the quiet, enormous success of the Apache community and the GNOME community and their peers. This, not the commercial bubble, is the true open source way.

[First published in ComputerWorldUK]

Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

♥ Now On Kindle

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Simon Phipps

If you’re a Kindle owner, you may be interested to know that Wild Webmink is now available for the Kindle. Go to the Kindle Store US or the Kindle Store UK to subscribe.

Filed under: Webmink | 3 Comments »

☞ Paved With Good Intentions

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Simon Phipps
  • WikiLeaks disclosures are a ‘tragedy’
    Yes, I get the fact the documents smear the war and that the US government spins the facts. I also get that there’s a damage control media campaign in progress. But this former General makes excellent points that I only see the Wikileaks people making indignant hand waving responses to. And I can totally see how the leaks advantage America’s enemies.

  • Taliban Study WikiLeaks to Hunt Informants
    If this is true it undermines the whole transparency case Assange is making and shames everyone involved. Investigative journalism is not about enabling the enemy to kill more people, regardless of the war disgrace being exposed

  • Gel for decayed teeth ‘could spell end to fillings’
    While at first this sounds wonderful, it acts so fast that I have to wonder what other effects it might have. Still, I want some!

Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »

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    All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.

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