Is Sun subverting Linux from the inside?

Sun plans to open source the latest release of its Unix operating system, Solaris 10, during the second quarter of this year under the moniker OpenSolaris. (Some say it has already taken initial steps with a performance management component called Dtrace).

Thomas Goguen, vice-president of product marketing for Sun's operating platforms group, explains the rationale: "We want to expand the ecosystem for Solaris. The vibrancy of an operating system depends on the number of organisations associated with it. We've spent half a billion dollars engineering Solaris and that investment was made for free, but we've now made it open source and this will all contribute to the vibrant environment around it."

But Andy Butler, a vice-president at analyst Gartner, sees the move as somewhat "opportunistic" as Sun bids to ride the "fashionable" open source wave in a bid to counteract the threat posed by Linux. He believes it reflects a desire to reverse the widespread view that the vendor is "very proprietary", and to point up the fact that it has been a major contributor to the open source community for years.

The issue Sun is trying to address is that, over the last few years, Linux has been eating away at the lower end of its Solaris-on-Sparc-based business, which is still its cash cow. The freeware OS has increasingly been deployed in the workstation arena and in infrastructure areas such as file and print and Web hosting where Sun was traditionally strong.

But, as Butler explains, the issue is not a software one per se. "For customers, it's more of a hardware than a software-based decision due to cost, but because Solaris has not been seen as a viable x86 operating system, the result has been, without any real animosity, that people have been moving towards something native to x86. It could be Windows, but it's generally Linux."

Sun has see-sawed between whether to run Solaris on x86 over the years or not, but went down this route again in the first quarter of last year. The decision to open source Solaris is simply the next step, aimed primarily at expanding adoption of the OS on x86 -- although Solaris' code base is the same whether it runs on x86 or Sun's own Sparc processor, which means that the move covers both environments.