OpenSolaris retains some of the bureaucracy that characterises Sun itself. In an interview last month, Sun's open source software director Stephen Harpster illustrated some of these tendencies when explaining how code contributions to OpenSolaris worked: "The way it has worked for the last year and a half is that if you are not a Sun employee and you want to make a change to the source code what you have to do is e-mail your changes into a Sun employee and then the Sun employee has to apply the changes for you. Obviously that doesn't scale and is not desirable."

Given that OpenSolaris released its first bits of code in June 2005, to find the project in this state 18 months down the line is confirmation that starchiness takes a long time to disappear. Eighteen months has resonance for the tech industry - it is the period cited in Moore's law for the number of transistors on a piece of silicon to double. In short, it is a lifetime in the computer industry.

Last year Sun did what FOSS advocates had been asking the company to do for a long time - release Java under an open source licence. Sun chose the GPLv2, a marked departure from its earlier flirtations. But this appears to be too little, too late.

Funnily, Sun is resisting the idea of GNU/Solaris for the same reason that it floated the same idea - the GPLv3. If Linux were to come under GPLv3 then the best parts of GNU/Solaris could be shared by Linux. And Sun has very real reason to fear that such sharing of code would make Solaris of even less import in today's world. Given the rate at which corporates are moving from all breeds of Unix to Linux, the availablity of the best of Solaris in Linux may end up making Solaris irrelevant.

But, as usual, those interested in a marriage between Solaris and GNU software do not wait for the corporate wheels to turn at Sun. An unofficial GNU/OpenSolaris distribution has reached alpha 6, with the company behind it claiming that it contains the best software - the SunOS kernel and GNU software. Downloads are linked off this page.

It looks like Sun has missed the boat - again.

{moscomment}

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