OpenIndiana: Oracle's Open Source Quandary

They complained they heard nothing and saw less.

So a group of OpenSolaris developers stopped waiting. Armed with the code that Sun Microsystems flung open to the development community several years ago, they took off independently and began providing their own road maps and agenda for the OS's development.

Enter: Project OpenIndiana, the latest in a growing lineup of cost-of-acquisition-free and free-for-development operating systems.

It's described by its founders as "a continuation of the OpenSolaris operating system, conceived during the period of uncertainty following the Oracle takeover of Sun Microsystems after several months passed with no binary updates made available to the public."

According to an internal Oracle memo that was leaked to the OpenSolaris community, the company told developers it was seriously tapering off its contribution to OpenSolaris:

"(1) We can't do everything. The limiting factor is our engineering bandwidth measured in people and time. So we have to ensure our top priority is driving delivery of the #1 Enterprise Operating System, Solaris 11, to grow our systems business; and (2) We want the adoption of our technology and intellectual property to accelerate our overall goals, yet not permit competitors to derive business advantage (or FUD) from our innovations before we do."

Both the Solaris and OpenSolaris installed bases are small. However, Oracle is adamant about leveraging its proprietary operating system, noting that 40 percent of Oracle database installations are on Solaris systems. That's the business reality.

The technical reality is just as stark. While OpenIndiana is just getting under way, we had the chance to take a look at it in the CRN Test Center lab.

It's an easy download and installation, and worked nicely in the Oracle VirtualBox VM in which we got it up and running. The look and feel is exactly what you'd expect: like an OpenSolaris sibling in its GUI and functionality. That's good or bad depending on how you look at it. The universe of applications available to OpenSolaris is miniscule compared to, say, Ubuntu and certainly Windows.

Frankly, if you're looking at OpenSolaris or OpenIndiana as a platform for significant application software, you better be prepared to write that software yourself. Even though Sun Microsystems is the company that gave birth to both OpenSolaris and OpenOffice.org, running current versions of OpenOffice.org on either OpenSolaris or OpenIndiana wasn't possible on the version we tested.

This isn't to say that OpenIndiana doesn't show significant promise. There is a reason why so much enterprise software, including Oracle, runs on proprietary Solaris systems -- it's scalable, secure and provides nice performance. In addition, the network-readiness of OpenIndiana and OpenSolaris is significant -- with Crossbow network virtualization having been built into a previous release of OpenSolaris before Oracle's decision to taper off its efforts. Crossbow was designed to virtualize the stack and NIC around Web services and protocols; over time, this could prove to be a killer function that becomes more attractive as both on-premise and hosted virtual IT expands its footprint.

The organization is sponsored by the Illumos Foundation, and on launch day had 20 "or so" core contributors worldwide, significantly fewer than other OS development communities.

The bottom line: Oracle has essentially undone much of the work that Sun had built in developing an open-source community around its Solaris foundation -- seeing a responsibility to shareholders to maximize resources in a profitable way. Open-Solaris -- despite advances like Crossbow -- hasn't been able to lead as vibrant an ecosystem as other open source platforms, and that's a major limitation.

OpenIndiana picks up where OpenSolaris left off. Its key challenges will be to do essentially what Canonical has done with Ubuntu: foster an ecosystem of applications and solutions that will create a "multiplier effect" on its momentum. Sun and Oracle couldn't do it. Maybe this effort will.

COMMUNITY: Connect with the CRN Test Center at community.crn.com.