Sun: OpenSolaris not aimed at Linux

newsmaker By making its cherished Solaris operating system open-source, Sun Microsystems has taken a huge step forward in a bid to recover its former shine during the late 90s.

While some may see OpenSolaris as Sun's attempt to fend off its traditional rivals, Matt Thompson, the company's director of technology outreach and open source programs, begs to differ.

In an exclusive interview with ZDNet Asia, Thompson explains that OpenSolaris was never aimed at Linux. In fact, he is glad when developers choose to program on Linux because the dominant programming language used on Linux is Sun's Java.

The company also recently started an office dedicated to and responsible for coordinating all open-source activities. The office encompasses an open-source council that has representatives from Thompson's team, the product teams, the CTO (chief technology officer) group, and several other executives who drive our open-source strategy.

Q: What are the challenges in promoting open source adoption in Asia?
A: It breaks down into different factors. One is the economic factor.

For countries sensitive to high prices, any increase in cost to them will cause a slowdown in infrastructure build-out or adoption. In places like the Philippines and Vietnam, and to some extent, Thailand, open source is the de facto standard for all new projects as they believe the cost will be less than having to buy software.

One of the things that we've been doing is to educate people that open source is never free. In the case where countries adopt open source strictly based on cost, they are missing out in calculating the additional cost that will come in.

In other countries like Singapore, India, China, Japan and Korea, we are seeing companies taking a much more careful look at what open source provides, and the adoption of things that will add value to the (open source) ecosystem and commoditize the infrastructure. For example, Sun recently open-sourced our base-level application server, which is very useful to places like these countries because application servers are part of the infrastructure now. It's not something that differentiates value.

The developer side is more interesting. Developing software is still a form of creativity. The process of building software is a lot like art--you're not sure if you're done even when you're done. And so, the concept of open source accelerates the creation process because the barrier to entry is only how fast developers can learn. That's always been an interesting challenge to developers.

Many see OpenSolaris as a move to fend off rivals Red Hat, IBM and Microsoft. Is that true?
When we did OpenSolaris, we were definitely not aiming at Linux. We look at Linux as another variant of Unix. We see Solaris and most of the Linux distributions as peers. The Linux movement is something that I want to see more of.

There's data from Evans Research Corporation that looks at which platforms developers are coding on. Over the last four years, the percentage of developers that sit on Microsoft primarily has come down. It's still above 90 percent, but it has come down. All of that has moved to Linux, and I'd like to see more of this.

The more developers who move to Linux, the happier I am because the number one language used on Linux for (software) development is Java. I want them all off Microsoft. With regard to OpenSolaris, when you look at the different distributions, one of the things we realized very quickly was that Red Hat was clearly getting a dominant position in the market.

So from an operating system perspective, we are competing against HP-UX and AIX, and to some extent we are competing against Red Hat as well, not against Linux, but against the Red Hat corporate entity.

When you look at OpenSolaris, it's very much about reinvigorating a developer community around the Solaris technology, just as they have in a borrowed fashion around Linux.

Today, you can't as a community, do a put-back into the Red Hat distribution. They have Fedora, and they will pick and choose which pieces they want out of that project. We've offered a much different value proposition. Our Solaris engineers are spending time in the community daily, looking at ideas, engaging in forums, blogging, and taking part in different wikis to develop the next version of Solaris.

And when we do our weekly builds for the next version of Solaris, it's out of the source codes that come from OpenSolaris. It's not a separate source tree where you people over there do your open thing, while we do our private thing over here. That's what Red Hat does.

We're saying that we are completely open. You tell us what to do and help us do that, and we're going to build the next generation software after that. It's about reinvigorating the community and innovation.