Opensolaris Opens for business, Gentoo announces support

Opensolaris is now open for business, and to show their seriousness, the source code for dtrace is available for download. Brian Cantrill blogged about it here.

Gentoo, on the other hand, hopes that it will become an important factor for Opensolaris' success.

We're able to build on prior experience with Gentoo ports to non-Linux operating systems, we've had the technology preview of Gentoo for Mac OS X, we've got developers working full-time on Opendarwin support, and we're well out of the starting blocks for the race to Gentoo-ified BSD kernels and userland applications," he says. "But even I wasn't quite prepared for my Sparc booting with a Gentoo bootsplash," laughs Pieter.

The unofficial Portaris or "Portage for Solaris" project has been maintaining Gentoo's package management system on top of Solaris 9 and 10 systems. Its two biggest contributors, Sunil Kumar and Jason Wohlgemuth (who, like Pieter, is a member of Sun's pilot program for open-sourcing Solaris), have invested a tremendous amount of their time in this project, culminating in a veritable installer for Solaris that has been available to a small, knowledgeable Solaris user community for several months already.

I'm pretty sure Gentoo developers will be able to contribute to Opensolaris' success based on their experience. After all, they've already have some of the tools developed. Now it is a matter of getting things worked out with the Opensolaris developers. One of Gentoo developers made a point about Opensolaris here.

There appears to be four different possibilities as to how things will be opened.

1. Code written by Sun is made open source.
2. Sun contacts outside vendors from whom they've licensed code, to ask them for permission to release their code. (Unlikely, IMO)
3. Sun removes copyrighted code and rewrites it and releases it as Open Source.
4. Sun removes copyrighted code and allows the community to write an Open Source replacement for it.