ex tempore

The big news of the day isn ‘t that Sun is freeing java under GPL, the big news is that they are going to to do the same with… Opensolaris. That is, obviously, the right thing to do. Not only Linux will benefit from some of the cool stuff Solaris has (in one word – ZFS), but Sun will benefit too, and a lot. After all, and independently (me) of considering that in the long term there are no space for OpenSolaris, as it stands today, as a general purpose end-to-end mass market operating system, there are too many stuff that would only benefit all sides if developed jointly and in parallel, avoiding unnecessary effort duplication. Stuff like Xen, device drivers, even filesystems, hal, acpi, lots of APIs, etc, would gain a lot if developed/released/synced a layer above the OS (as Xorg proved that it is possible, and scalable). For the moment, and under CDDL, the ‘opensourcing’ of Solaris only appealed to those already in the Solaris camp (mainly inside Sun) having little or no impact in the general *nix landscape. If Sun truly believes they have a superior OS, as they say, then they should have no fear going the GPL route because it will be the linux features that would land in Solaris and not the other way (emptying solaris’ appeal)…

In the meantime, and coming back to Java – hats off to Jonathan Schwartz and… well done Sun! Thank you, too.