Call To Save Open Solaris: Fork It!

Dear Free Software Community,

Call it a tragedy, or call it history repeating itself, but yet another UNIX-like operating system has been encumbered by a company with purely commercial interests. The OpenSolaris operating system, the last and only remaining Open Source variant of the original System V Release 4 operating system, has seemingly been sentenced to death by its patron Sun Microsystems, after being taken over by Oracle.

This had happened in the past, again with another UNIX variant, the original Berkeley Software Distribution, due to licensing issues with AT&T. The community had replied by preserving the open source part of the software and re-writing the encumbered parts. The result was 4.4BSD Lite, which although unusable, proved to be the bases of two of the most phenomenally robust and successful UNIX-like operating systems ever built, FreeBSD and NetBSD.

History repeats itself, as Oracle has more or less closed down OpenSolaris development. Their proprietary offering, Oracle Solaris, will be available in a 90-day trial version, after which one will have to pay for a license. Oracle has also made it clear that code for all the top-level enhancements in OpenSolaris may not be available, and thus may not be backported to OpenSolaris.

What is more serious, is that OpenSolaris seems to have been completely ignored by Oracle as a company. "Project Wonderland", the 3D virtual world toolkit created by Sun was earlier completely abandoned by Oracle. However, the project has found a new home in the Open Wonderland project. OpenSolaris though, seems to remain without support from Oracle.

Note that the news of Oracle abandoning OpenSolaris is completely unofficial, and is based on the blog posts made by Oracle employees. Peter Tribble  wrote on his blog post Oracle's acquisition of Sun that, "After a prolonged wait, Oracle have now completed their takeover of Sun. Late January, they presented their plans for taking Sun's products forward.OpenSolaris wasn't even mentioned.If you look carefully, it's on a slide, but that's about it. That silence has continued. OpenSolaris has - publicly at least - been completely ignored by Oracle. It's as if we don't exist."

It is now up to the community to preserve this operating system, and maybe improve on it in the process. We at Katonda are devoted to the cause of free software, and we especially cannot bear the thought of such a technologically advanced piece of software being encumbered by code openness and licensing. We therefore ask the community if it would be interested to fork and continue development on the OpenSolaris operating system, purely as a free software project, and driven by the community's desire to create a technological masterpiece rather than the commercial interests of a parent company.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done in this respect. The OpenSolaris project is NOT completely open source. Parts are still encumbered by licensing restriction, and still other parts are available only as binaries. The project would need to extract the CDDL parts of the system, and re-write the encumbered parts of the software. While at it, it would also need to fix technical issues with the current avatar of the software, including speed and responsiveness issues on certain 64-bit systems. The final product should be a fresh new system that is friendly to end-users and enterprise customers alike. It would be licensed under the CDDL.

We'd love to provide you, the community with any and all support required, to the best of our abilities. We'd like you to contact us at SaveTheCodeMuktware [dot] com if you are interested. Any and all response we receive will go towards creating, supporting and maintaining a project that will hope to keep the SVR4 code alive and open, for use by anyone who wishes to, and to preserve a legacy. We mean, this is actually System V code!

Let us be completely clear about this, we are not criticizing or otherwise trying to negatively damage Oracle in any way. In fact, we are indifferent to what hey are doing. We suppose they must do whatever they are doing to support themselves and their employees and stay in the business. We just cannot bear to see the code being possibly locked up, and thus we propose to take it forward as a community project.

Yours Always,

Muktware SAVE THE CODE Initiative