New Open Source Solaris Pits Sun Against Linux
Sun and the OpenSolaris community are launching the first official release of Sun’s open-source version of the Solaris operating system. Interested developers have had early preview versions to play with for some time, but the official release opens to door for corporate customers as well.
OpenSolaris is based on the Solaris kernel and uses many of its features like the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), which offers predictive self-healing capabilities.
Although Sun’s Solaris OS is most often associated with large business clients, OpenSolaris is aiming for a different audience, one that has traditionally used Linux — startups and developers working with popular new web technologies like Ruby on Rails.
OpenSolaris ships with the new image packaging system, which works much like apt-get on Linux, making it easy to download and install Solaris packages like Apache, Ruby on Rails, PHP and other development tools.
Essentially Sun is mimicking many of Linux’s strategies in hopes of gaining a bit more traction among developers committed to open source technologies.
While those running their web stack on Red Hat or perhaps Ubuntu Linux are certainly part of Sun’s target audience for OpenSolaris, the company isn’t neglecting developers who’ve switched to the new development hotness — hosted “cloud computing” platforms like Amazon’s EC2.
As part of the OpenSolaris release, Amazon is now offering the ability to run OpenSolaris applications on its EC2 servers. For now Amazon’s OpenSolaris support is limited to invitation-only clients, but Amazon plans to open it up more as the kinks are worked out.
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