There is no need for Sun to rush the release of an open source version of its Solaris operating system because Linux still has a lot of catching up to do.
This is the view of Dumisani Mtoba, senior systems engineer at Sun Microsystems SA.
"Millions of lines of code have to be reviewed to decide what legally belongs to Sun," explains Mtoba. "We also need to make a decision about what kind of open source licence Solaris will have. That process is still underway."
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO and president declined to give a target date when he announced in Shanghai this week that the company was working on an open source version of Solaris.
Following the announcement, Eric Raymond of the Open Source Initiative was quoted as saying that if Sun did not release open source Solaris within six months, it would no longer matter or be of interest to developers.
"This statement is completely untrue," says Mtoba. "Linux will not catch up with Solaris in six months because there are many areas where it cannot compete such as linear scalability in mid‑range to high‑end systems."
Mtoba says Solaris has a large installed base and there have already been thousands of downloads of the beta version of Solaris 10. "This phenomenal interest is an indication that Solaris will continue to be a popular platform."
Since Star Office went open source under the name Open Office, it has developed into the main rival of Microsoft Office because of the support of the community. Mtoba says Sun hopes open source Solaris will achieve a similar amount of traction.
"We would like to see a community behind Solaris using a framework similar to the Java community process that produces standards for new versions of the software."
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