GNU/Solaris - When the fun begins...

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Back in the day, when Scott McNealy was still the "chairman, president, founder, chief cook and bottle washer" of Sun, the company made a virtue of simultaneously loving and loathing GNU/Linux and the GPL.

On the one hand, giving love and sustenance to the developer communities that work around OpenOffice, Gnome and Firefox, and on the other, deploying or disparaging GNU/Linux in equal measure at every conflicting opportunity.

There were good reasons for Sun's ambivalence. Linux and other free software had stolen much of Sun's thunder in the server space and the data centre, but had also proved useful in other parts of the business, providing GNU tools for the power user, Samba to provide interoperability with Windows, a desktop for Solaris, and a platform for Looking Glass and the Java Desktop.

More importantly, Linux on commodity hardware has made severe inroads into Sun's chip business, and the company hasn't always known how to react.

It could even be argued that Sun has roots in open source. Bill Joy, who led the open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) project in its early years, and contributed TCP/IP, vi, the classic in-line programming editor, NFS, and the csh shell, went on to become a founder of Sun. He became Sun's resident in-house technology guru, the master of Solaris and chief architect of Sun's technology strategy, before losing his religion and dedicating himself to other ventures. In 2000 he wrote a coruscating piece called "Why the future doesn't need us" about how "our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species", and finally disappeared from Sun's orbit in 2003. But that's another story...

Smell the coffee

Although it has never fully embraced free software, Sun has always worked well with its developer communities. Nonetheless, Sun's announcement late in 2006 that it would release Java under the GPL came as something of a surprise, and was seen as a triumph for the GPL and a lifeline for Java. Marc Fleury, the founder of JBoss, the free software J2EE middleware platform, expressed a common sentiment when he said that he believed that the GPL would "extend the life of Java by at least fifteen years."

Sun's apparent conversion to the GPL and the world of free software may have been unexpected, but Fleury's take was that "the GPL is the best of both worlds, because [it] creates a very strong notion of intellectual property," and allows Sun "to monetise the Java ME environment." Not so long ago it would have been controversial to suggest that the GPL might be the most suitable open source licence for business applications. These days the idea is commonplace.

The Java announcement is already seen as a success. Sun has new leadership, and is no longer quite so ambivalent in its assessment of the value of the free software community. Possessed of a new vision of Sun's role in the brave new world of free and open source software, Sun followed up the Java declaration by hiring Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian GNU/Linux community, as its chief operating systems officer, and hinted that it might release not only Solaris but also "the core intellectual property behind our multi-threaded Niagara systems", under the GPLv3, the free software community's latest and greatest licence, (and more recently, by purchasing MySQL, the open source database company).

The GPL was the original creation of Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation. GPLv3 was the result of months of argument, consultation and compromise among free software developers and corporate lawyers, but not everybody likes the GPLv3, and its most vocal opponent has been Linus Torvalds, who wants the Linux kernel to retain v2 of the licence. Stallman and Torvalds represent different wings of the free software movement. Torvalds is a pragmatist. Stallman sees himself as "an activist in the free software movement." Torvalds tends to the view that the anti-DRM clause in the licence is an unwarranted restriction. Stallman believes it to be a necessity.

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