Phoenix rising from OpenSolaris ashes

I got a little nostalgic over the weekend. As I was working on Solaris 11 x86 over the past few weeks, I got a little bit peeved about how much Oracle has changed the OS.

Command like ifconfig doesn’t not appear to be very functional anymore and instead ipadm has taken over most of the configuration options. And when I working with Jumpstart (damn!), it does not work the way that I know anymore. And now AI (Automated Install) has taken over Jumpstart and I got to relearn the whole what-ca-ma-callit. Dang!

I remembered the day when Solaris x86 first came out in the early 90s. I was ecstatic because I could finally test and run Solaris on x86 platform. I could get things running at home and have fun with it. Drivers were limited then (and still is but has gotten much better) but I was happily hacking away together with other Linux distros as the open source revolution was just beginning. After I joined NetApp, things started to change and I abandoned Solaris in favour of Linux as my job, as well as my interest, were on Linux, especially RedHat. I eventually got my RHCE and completely lost touch with Solaris. By 2005, when OpenSolaris was announced under CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), I was no longer well versed with the developments of Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Enough about my nostalgia because I am beginning to see a young phoenix (a mythical firebird) rising from the mess of what Oracle did with OpenSolaris! Since Oracle purchased Sun in 2010, Oracle has practically burned OpenSolaris to ashes. On August 13 2010, Oracle announced the end of OpenSolaris in an internal memo and it read:

Solaris Engineering,

Today we are announcing a set of decisions regarding the path to
Solaris 11, and answering key pending questions on open source, open
development, software and binary licenses, and how developers and
early adopters will be able to use Solaris 11 technology before its
release in 2011.

As you all know, the term “OpenSolaris” has been used colloquially to
refer to any or all of a collection of source code, a development
model, a web site, a logo, a binary release, a source license, a
community, and many other related things. So it’s taken a while to go
over each issue from an organizational and business perspective, and
align on the correct next step. Therefore, please take the time to
read all of the detail here carefully. We’ll discuss our strategy
first, and then the decisions and changes to our policies and
processes that implement that strategy.

If you want the entire memo (and all the fa-lah-lah that goes with it), go to Steven Stallion’s blog. Incidentally Steven Stallion was the OpenSolaris kernel developer who leaked the memo into the open.

It became pretty obvious that Oracle business suit culture and “is this going to make money?” ways were suffocating talents and innovations of the Sun engineering tribes. Some of the high profile leavers were James Gosling (father of Java) and Jeff Bonwick (father of RAID-Z and led the ZFS development team in Sun). And there were many top talents exodus within 90-120 days after the Oracle acquisition.

The key technologies that went into OpenSolaris (and Solaris) were slowly but surely deprived of their inventors’ and maintainers nourishment. These technologies were:

• ZFS (Project Pacific)
• DTrace
• Zones (aka Solaris Containers, aka Project Kevlar)
• Fault Management Architecture (FMA)
• Service Management Facility (SMF)
• Advanced Network Virtualization (Project Crossbow)
• Least-privilege

and many more. Some of these technologies were already open under CDDL license but some were still very much proprietary to Sun (I mean, Oracle). It was difficult to use what was available under OpenSolaris CDDL license to rebuild again, especially when the inventors, talents and maintainers are now all scattered in companies like Delphix, Nexenta, Greenbytes, Joyent and so on .

At the end of last year, shortly before Solaris 11 was announced by Oracle, the people who are passionate about OpenSolaris (and Solaris) have got together in full force again. Dubbed “Project Illumos“, the key people who has developed for Sun convened to build a new open-source, Solaris-based operating environment. The proprietary bits that are closely guarded by Oracle are going to be either rebuilt from scratch or ported from BSD into the last OpenSolaris-kernel before Oracle killed it. That kernel was Solaris Nevada, which was supposed to be the successor of Solaris 10.

The Illumos team already has a bootable and working operating environment and new developments are going on at a frantic pace. From the words of Bryan Cantrill (father of DTrace) and now VP of Engineering at Joyent,

“illumos was not designed to be a fork,but rather an entirely open downstream repository of OpenSolaris”

And the talents congregating to the Illumos project (like moths to a flame) are super-stellar. Just have a look at this list: