Seeking to highlight its status as the mature, enterprise alternative to Red Hat, Sun convened a special open source prequel to this year’s JavaOne, unleashing the much-awaited OpenSolaris and making a parallel announcement that OpenSolaris would be supported by Amazon's EC2 “Elastic” Computing Cloud.

Along with Java, OpenSolaris is the crown jewel that became open sourced as a result of CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s strategies. While Linux’s (the poster penguin for open source platforms) claim to fame is that it was modeled after UNIX, Sun’s strategy has been to say, if you like open source, come home to papa. It pitches OpenSolaris as the proven, industrial strength alternative to Linux. As part of that strategy, it is bundling the distro with ZFS, its relatively new 128-bit file system whose scalability is 18.4 billion billion that of 64-bit. That means you’ve got a file system that, although not as well known as the old NFS warhorse, should hit the wall for a long, long time. By the way, ZFS also comes with support of instant roll-back and continual check-summing capabilities, in case you want to ensure your endless, virtualized clusters are never corrupted. And it comes with Sun’s DTrace (dynamic trace) OS probe. 

As part of the announcement, Sun is supporting the OpenSolaris/MySQL bundle on the Amazon EC2 cloud. The net effect is that people who still consider Linux too lightweight might be willing to kick the tires on EC2 now that there is an “adult” OS available on it. Ironically, it’s paired with a database that, while getting more scalable, is still considered to be something of a web midget. In the long run, Sun is seeking to make MySQL the de facto Oracle alternative as part of its open source operating stack – although at this point, EnterpriseDB probably has better claim to that positioning (it just announced its first partner program).

Rounding out CommunityOne was Sun’s announcement of the next version of NetBeans, the perennial also-ran to Eclipse. NetBeans 6.1 adds new features supporting Ajax development using JavaScript, plus tighter integration with MySQL. Other new NetBeans features include faster startup and code completion, more support for Ruby and JRuby (Sun’s JVM-optimized rendition of Ruby), including a new Ruby platform manager, support for IBM’s Rational ClearCase version control system, and new JavaScript browser compatibility features for Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari or Windows Internet Explorer.

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