Sun finally pushed out its Project Indiana yesterday, in the form of a packaged version of OpenSolaris that looks quite a lot like a Linux distro — minus, of course, the kernel that gives Linux its name. On the one hand, I’m pleased to see any FOSS project moving forward. On the other hand, I’m wondering what problems Sun can solve with OpenSolaris that it can’t solve by participating in the Linux community?

The OpenSolaris release was timed to coincide with Sun’s CommunityOne conference yesterday, where I was invited to give a talk on openSUSE and appear on the distro panel with community leaders from Ubuntu (Jono Bacon), Fedora (Karsten Wade), and OpenSolaris (Glynn Foster) and moderated by Sun’s Barton George. (We also recorded a podcast shortly thereafter, which should be released in the next few weeks.)

Removing redundancy

The panel discussion was probably one of the most lively, and certainly the most fun, that I’ve been on. One of the things that we all seemed to agree on — there wasn’t a lot of strong disagreement on any topic, believe it or not — is that there’s a great deal of room for additional collaboration between projects to remove redundancy between distros and the efforts to fix bugs in upstream projects.

Glynn noted a few times that, when wearing his GNOME hat, he sees a lot of waste in different Linux distros fixing or developing things internally with respect to GNOME rather than doing so within GNOME itself.

I think we’re (we in this case being the Linux community in general) getting better in this regard and I’ve observed a lot more willingness to collaborate between distros and projects like GNOME and KDE in the past year than ever before. As Karsten points out “It turns out that, surprise surprise, for the vast majority of concerns, we are all in violent agreement. When you get down to where the differences exist, the less than 5% area, it is hugely gray.”

However, Karsten also compares the panelists to football captains “and it turns out that, aside from the uniforms and different team names, we’re all footballers and think the game should be played the same way.”

I think that’s true, with the exception of Sun — we’re all suited up to play “Linux,” and Sun’s taking the ball to its own field. While Sun collaborates in many of the same communities that Linux vendors and projects do, I’m a bit disappointed that Sun is trying to replicate the Linux experience with OpenSolaris while remaining separate and trying to build a parallel community to ours.

To abuse Karsten’s football analogy further, it’s like the difference between what the United States refers to as football, and what the rest of the world refers to as football. Similar in the respects that each game has a community, but the players are not interchangeable.

Control

Ultimately, I can’t help but think that the problem that Sun is trying to solve with OpenSolaris is not a technical one, but one of control. Specifically, the company is not ready to cede control over its operating system to the community at large, and so it is instead trying to build a community around OpenSolaris rather than joining the larger Linux effort.

If you look at the design decisions behind OpenSolaris — a GNOME-based desktop, an APT-like package manager, timed release cycle — Sun is clearly trying to ape Linux without actually being Linux. Perhaps Sun thinks its operating system is technically superior, and I’m sure there’s some of that — but the company could choose to license its software in a compatible manner and attempt to bring its benefits to Linux rather than pursing a silo-ed strategy.

Before the objection is raised, I’ll concede that control is also an issue for Linux vendors, but to a much lesser degree. As Sun’s Ian Murdock discovered with the failed DCC Alliance, major vendors and projects weren’t quite ready to cede control over the base distribution — but we all have the same general goals, and the work that Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, and others do towards Linux usually benefits the entire community. I don’t see a great deal of benefit in trying to create a parallel community controlled by a single vendor.

Even if Sun is successful in building a strong external community around OpenSolaris, it will take years of effort, and I think that Sun would benefit much more by concentrating on Linux than by trying to clone the Linux community with itself at the center.

I think that it’s in some sense ironic that Sun made its OpenSolaris announcement at a conference titled “CommunityOne” — community is in one sense about the individual members giving up some control in the interest of the greater good. It’s something Linux vendors are starting to learn, finally, and I hope that one day Sun learns it as well.

Novell is working with Microsoft to help Microsoft cooperate and contribute to open source projects under open source licenses, and sticking with the existing standards to do so. Keen observers of the tech industry might note that this is a bit of a rarity, but it’s something that I hope we’ll see more of from Microsoft.

The announcement went out today that Novell and Microsoft are collaborating around the OpenPegasus project and other system management tools.

Thanks to Novell, Microsoft is going to be contributing to several open source projects — and making Linux easier to manage. Yes, you read that right. It will also make Windows easier to manage using Linux tools — which is going to be a breath of fresh air for Linux admins tasked with managing Windows boxen as well.

I spoke to Eric Anderson, vice president of engineering for Novell, about the agreement and got some additional details on how the deal came about, and a little background. Eric says that Novell was approached by Microsoft for help working on these projects and that we happily agreed to do so, as long as Microsoft work with those communities and contribute back to them.

Of course, one of my first questions was “what licenses will Microsoft be contributing under?” The OpenPegasus project itself is licensed under the MIT license, and other parts of the project involve providers under the SBLIM which is under the Common Public License, and providers that are under a BSD license.

Microsoft will also be submitting some code under one of its OSI-approved licenses.

Why this is important

Getting Microsoft involved, as an equal participant in the project, is a huge step. Microsoft has started to take tentative steps into the open source community, but this is one of the first times that Microsoft is going to be participating on equal footing with the rest of the open source community on a project started externally.

I may be an idealist — OK, I am an idealist — but I think nothing but good can come from getting developers to sit down together and work on common code — even when, maybe especially when, one of the parties at the table is Microsoft.

It’s hard to maintain a hard-line stance when you sit down and work with another person on a common problem. I don’t expect an overnight cultural change at Microsoft as part of this collaboration, but I think it will have a positive effect. The only way to find out is to try.

This is, of course, good for Linux and the community too — anything that makes it easier to manage Linux boxes along side Windows (or in any heterogeneous environment, for that matter) is going to help Linux adoption. Giving Windows admins tools to easily administer Linux boxes will help to remove some of the barriers to adoption in Microsoft environments.

I talk to admins all the time who express frustration in getting Linux into their environment, who have to fight arguments against Linux because it lacks the standard management tools that come with Windows. Well, that argument will be easily dismissed in the not-too-distant future, and I think that will help accelerate the adoption of Linux in the enterprise even more.

Of course, this is good for Microsoft as well. Its customers have been asking for Linux, and by providing better Linux support, Microsoft makes its customers happy, and helps Microsoft remain relevant with those customers. But this also means that Linux will continue to spread through the enterprise, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

It’s not just Novell and Microsoft in the management boat, though — this is something that has been a sore point for Linux for years, and we’re hoping that the community can work together on this front to make Linux management easier.

Eric stressed the opportunity in this arrangement for the Linux community to help improve Linux management capabilities as well. Eric says he’d like to see the Pegasus community work on writing management providers so that every service (where it makes sense) is manageable through this framework and so that the Linux management experience is as cohesive, powerful, and easy as any other platform on the market.

I couldn’t agree more — the easier it is to manage and work with Linux systems, all the better for Linux adoption.

Some really nice comments about the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 in this week’s DistroWatch weekly newsletter:

Many people expect the upcoming release of openSUSE, version 11.0, to be possibly the most important breakthrough in terms of desktop Linux usability enhancements and user interface updates. One of the magic tools that helps the developers accomplish their goals is openSUSE Build Service (OBS), an infrastructure for building openSUSE packages.

That’s some pretty high praise, there, particularly from someone (Ladislav Bodnar) who has been reviewing and watching Linux development for a very long time.

I’m noting this not to brag on openSUSE, but as a note to openSUSE contributors — all of the hard work you’re doing for openSUSE 11.0 and the openSUSE Build Service has not gone unnoticed. In fact, it looks like people are getting very eager to see what openSUSE 11.0 looks like. I think people are going to be very pleased.

SUSE and openSUSE users should be well familiar with the slogan, “have a lot of fun!” I’ve always loved that (and the persistent green themes that accompany SUSE) about SUSE and openSUSE. Have a lot of fun!

Even though most of us use computers to get work done, I think there’s a pervasive attitude within the open source crowd I know that it’s possible to enjoy your work and Get Things Done while still having a good time.

I was thinking about this today when reading Dustin Puryear’s post over on O’Reilly’s Port 25 where he says (I’m paraphrasing here) Microsoft’s problem in academia is that it’s all work and no play, but UNIX (and I’m arbitrarily including Linux in this), vi, gcc, Perl, and the rest of the kit are “more fun to play with.”

Puryear notes, accurately I think:

Most of the innovations in software are from people that tweak, fiddle, and play with concepts, code, and ways of doing things. And THAT is the essence of academia: The freedom to play and learn and make progress.

I believe this is true in the business world as well. Generally speaking, progress is made by those folks who are enthusiastic, engaged, and having fun doing tremendous work. But why is it more fun on the *nix side of the house? I have some theories of my own, but I’d like to hear some of yours first.