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It took Sun a full five years to solve these issues with Solaris.

Solved? We should be so lucky. Things are far from solved. If Sun had released Solaris under the GPL, that would be good and done. Instead, it's under their own CDDL, which isn't easily compatible with the far-more-common GPL. This leads to issues for interesting projects like GNU/Solaris (Nexenta), which should have been quickly welcomed by the Open Source community. Instead, Sun's choice of the CDDL makes things complicated where they shouldn't be.

So, in short, I would not say that Sun 'solved' these 'problems' with Solaris, and I sincerely hope they do a better job with Java.

There's http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswikiNexenta

"I use Sun's GNOME on Solaris Express (aka fetal Solaris 11) fairly frequently"

I've been playing with Nexenta a bit. It's basically Ubuntu but with the OpenSolaris kernel. Or at least it's trying to be. On the whole it looks and feels like a Linux distro. Too bad zones don't work yet though.

Very cool stuff.

Choose one of the distros below - Schillix, BeleniX and Nexenta all have live CDs available in order to try
things out.

Solaris Express
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-expres s/get.jsp

Schillix
http://schillix.berlios.de/

BeleniX
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/ belenix_home.html

NexentaOS
http://www.gnusolaris.org/

marTux
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~mbeinsx/marTux/

Well, not making their stuff intentionally GPL-incompatible would REALLY help a lot.

From what I hear around, most developers just look at Sun's licenses and decide they don't want to touch them with a 10-foot pole. And this is really a sad thing: things like Nexenta are nearly dead while a tiny move could turn them into all-out sharing of code between Linux and Solaris. But no, Sun's can't swallow its pride and make small concessions while entering a field where it's not them who are the current leaders.

Having Solaris as a yet another Debian arch would be just awesome. And there are people interested in doing the work.

Distro.

I'm not sure why the Solaris distros haven't been shut down for similar reasons.

http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki
Nexenta and their apt repository of software some of which must conflict with the Solaris kernel.

I was very tempted to start experimenting with an OpenSolaris, but there appears to be some license incompatibilities.

Similar end user experience to ubuntu; different kernel.

As NexentaOS matures it might become the platform of choice for OpenOffice and Java. (Hint: all Sun products.)

There already is a GNU/Solaris distribution (called Nexenta).

I know 3 OpenSolaris distros, dunno if there are more. http://www.gnusolaris.org/ (Nexenta OS) looks to be the most complete, as the others (BeleniX and SchilliX) have either Live CD only or Console only (at least as I understood their website when I checked). In GNU/Solaris Nexenta OS you have KDE, Gnome, XFce4, real install or live CD as you wish. Works perfect on my PC. :-)

Imagine Debian on UltraSparc with a Solaris kernel.

you should check out http://www.gnusolaris.org/

Well, Solaris 10 is a proprietary Sun product. It's no surprise that there are additional or conflicting terms for it. There are plenty of analogues to use; for many years, BSDI sold (without source, and under very restrictive terms) various derivatives of the open source BSD operating system. Perfectly acceptable, and when Solaris 11 comes out I'm sure it will have terms different from those of the OpenSolaris technology too. The license allows this, and you shouldn't be surprised by it.

If the Solaris license makes you unhappy, don't use Solaris. Use one of the other OpenSolaris-based distributions instead; each distributor is free to offer you any terms he or she likes, provided that the source files they use that come from OpenSolaris are made available to you. You really should go read the license.

I guess I have to actually download the disks to know for certain what I can or can't do as the information from their website seems contradictory.

Actually this term exists partly because a lot of the software included in Solaris is open source, and you have additional rights to that software that aren't specified on that page. Do you really want to read 500 pages detailing all the licenses and what they cover? Especially since many of them are familiar licenses you probably know and love, like BSD and GPL? I sure don't want to.

Wow, thats not very open, and what is the point if the source is available?

You've answered your own question...the parts of Solaris that are open don't need to be reverse-engineered. The parts that aren't, well, Sun can license those under whatever terms they like. Again, if you don't like the Solaris license, you have a choice of distributions, just like you have with other open source operating systems.

My, a bit touchy about how people may talk about us, are we?

If you look at the Solaris Express (for Solaris 11) license terms, you'll notice that this has been removed. Again, Solaris 10 predates OpenSolaris and is not an open source operating system. Of course the benchmarking term does not apply to source or binaries you receive via OpenSolaris, either, only to the official Sun distribution.

I still wonder how supportive Sun is of open source. Do they only support it if they have little choice and then only if you use it in a way that will not benefit anyone else?

Check out the other distributions available already and other projects people are starting to work on. Sun gets nothing directly from these - neither revenue, nor opportunity to sell services or other software. Of course Sun does benefit, too; it gets increased mindshare for Solaris and perhaps a larger installed base of Solaris-compatible operating systems. But to say that these uses don't benefit anyone other than Sun is just wrong.

Even when you look at Stallman's insistence on naming a popular OS "GNU/Linux", not just "Linux", you see he's both right, and ahead of his time. Projects like Debian Solaris, Mac OSX, and other kernels made into OSes with GNU apps make the important distinction operative. Yet of course Stallman was ridiculed by hordes of nerds for insisting on the distinction. Socialization is relative to the society, and an "undersocialized nerd" is often an ubersocial geek that chattering nerds can't understand.

How is a "Red Hat binary" different from a "Linux binary"? What will it take to make Debian Linux binaries run on Solaris 10 with this Container tech running? Will Debian Linux binaries run on Debian Solaris with the Container running?

Open? Free? No way.

Hell, even their developer portal requires login to even look at. Doesn't smell like something open to the public to me...