Sun Names Stewards To Keep OpenSolaris Project Humming

"There are Sun diehards that aren't going to give up the gusto," said Gregg Rosenberg, CTO of Risis, Tinley Park, Ill. "But Linux has a well-established community that is 12-plus years in the making. I don't think you're going to see a large number of corporations with Sun investments stay on Sun hardware."

At the Open Source Business Conference last week, Sun introduced stewards to oversee the OpenSolaris project, the greater development community that will work on the open-source version of Solaris.

The mission of the five-member board is to draft a proposal to "bootstrap" the OpenSolaris community so it eventually can govern itself, said Simon Phipps, Sun's chief technology evangelist and a board member.

Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz also made an appearance at the conference to promote Sun's open-source plans. The Santa Clara, Calif., vendor expects to release buildable source code for Solaris 10 under the Common Development and Distribution License before June 30 and also plans to open-source its entire Java software stack, the Java Enterprise System.

In his keynote, Schwartz leveled veiled criticism at Microsoft and IBM for not being as supportive of open source as others in the community. "There are some that are standing on the sidelines applauding while others open-source [their] products," he said. "They maintain all of their IP and refuse to open-source any of it."

Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., is known as a staunch keeper of its source code, and Schwartz has openly criticized IBM for blasting Sun's proprietary hold on Java while at the same time not open-sourcing its own WebSphere Java application server.

To its credit, IBM, Armonk, N.Y., developed the open-source Eclipse tools framework, which is run independently by a consortium and is the most popular development framework competing with Microsoft's proprietary Visual Studio toolset.

Rosenberg said although Sun has made significant contributions to the open-source community, it should be aligning itself with companies such as IBM that have spun off successful open-source projects.