Slashdot Mirror
Sun Closes Solaris Source Sales June 30
Vardamir writes: "
It appears that Sun is no longer interested
in distributing the source code to their Solaris Operating System, even for
a charge of $75.00. 'Thanks for your interest and welcome to the
Solaris[tm] 8 Foundation Source Program. Please note that the Solaris
8 Foundation Source Program will be canceled effective June 30, 2001. In
addition, both the secure chat and code-exchange sites will also be terminated
on this date.' Get it while you still can, bzip it, and upload to a gnutella
server!" Hasn't exactly been that long a ride since this idea was first floated, but it never seemed to be the roaring success that Sun perhaps thought it would.
The more I read about Sun, the more I wonder why they were invited and integrated so tightly into the GNOME project. Sun is dangerous. You may think they're better than Microsoft because they do Unix and Java, but according to pure RMS tenants, they are not.
I have a feeling Sun will be the downfall of GNOME.
I'm amazed at how highly many people in the Linux community think of themselves and their work. When you talk provately with people from all the big companies in this industry, they will tell you, without exception, that Linux is a toy built by kiddies compared to Solaris, HP/UX, and AIX.
StarOffice is not Free (as in speech)... the project you are looking for is OpenOffice.
Although the weakness of DEC's hardware was a contributing factor in their downfall, it was not the pimary cause. I believe, and am well supported by others who were victmized, that DEC lost ground because they had an attitude problem. They thought they owned the marketplace and they acted very heavy-handidly with respect to both current and future customers - DEC marketing and sales thought they could get away with it because they thought they were the only game in town. By the time the realized they weren't the only horse in the race, they were so far behind that not even all of Microsoft's money could have saved them.
So, Arrogrance and Greed was DEC's problem, IMHO. Sun has this problem too, but not anywhere near as bad as DEC once did.
Maybe I read it wrong, but it sure sounded like Timothy is promoting software piracy in the post of this story. How completely irresponsibile can slashdot get. Just when I think slashdot is getting better, some idiot goes and posts some crap that suggests everyone become software pirates. Timothy deserves two slaps upside the head.
A PC is still just a PC. There are massive I/O considerations that the PC architecture(s) just do not yet properly address for this arena. Intel has led PC designers in the effort to enhance the PC with fancy northbridges and burstable, high-speed, special purpose busses, etc... This is still arranged around a core that is descended from the original PC-AT.
If your machine uses are centered around desktop console use, or the simple servicing of an IP stack (like a web-server), then a PC is usually the best dollar/performance machine in the world. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that these are the only significant areas of computer application. They are probably not even the most significant.
Jeremiah Cornelius
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The IDE model is extremely inexpensive, and the dual processor 1U netra is under $5000, I think.
No, this is not an e10k, and you can't partition it, but it is a solaris machine nonetheless.
Also, solaris is available for FREE for intel and sparc, so there can't be any argument about accessibility for Solaris. The source effort must have failed for other reasons, which I guess to be lack of enthusiasm.
> So get UltraSparc's score, double it, and you
> get
And you double it how? I'd be impressed if you could show me where you could buy an UltraSPARC that ran at 1.8GHz. I'm assuming the fastest Ultra you can buy is the 900MHz one, and the P4 kicks its butt. The key is that the P4 does run that fast, but nobody knows how to make an UltraSPARC run that fast, even if they wanted to.
Also note that you'd need to double the speed of the memory bus, and halve all latencies in everything, especially the RAM, to get double the SPECcpu score.
Sun's *SPARC cpus are way behind everyone else, but they keep selling them because they put them in very reliable machines and sell good support. Their good name helps, too. High processing speed is not their forte.
Read Silicon Insider: http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?Section=Col
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
--
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
"Get it while you still can, bzip it, and upload to a gnutella server!"
How can you upload anything to a gnutella server?
--
Fredrik Borg
--
Fredrik Borg
Student at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
It was the submitter that said that. Geez, not only do people not read the articles attached to Slashdot stories, they don't even read the blurb!
Oh, I don't know. I'd kind of like to see this replace OSS as the UNIX standard.
You're right, of course. Incidentally, I've been tracking comp.unix.solaris for a few weeks now, and the amount of ill will between between Linux supporters and Solaris admins is, while not overwhelming, a little bit unsettling.
It's not slashdot's opinion, it's the submitter's.
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
You put up your post, in a public forum, fully aware that it would be read, in such a manner.
Sun released their source code, under very specific guidelines. Which included not re-distributing it.
If you are going to insist, that companies like MS not hijack open source code, and repackage it as their own. Then you should allow them to use those same laws in the opposite manner. IP laws, are a two way street.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
do you have a URL for that? I absolutely could not find it last time I looked.
Is this yet another sign that Sun is weakening? Their hardware sales are begininning to be impacted by x86 as their system line falters and their OS if being whacked (especially on the low end) by Linux and its BSD bretheren. As the x86-64 and IA-64 lines progress the advantages of Sun hardware shrink. Free Java simplementations are starting to overshadow the JDK, especially in the Linux community. Sun, like SGI, is well on its way to becoming another RISC UNIX vendor killed by Linux and NT on x86. (How would _you_ save them? replies)
Also I think the Solaris code licensing fialure is do to the fact it wasn't an open project which would have allowed a "community" to be built around improving and enhancing Solaris. With the media cost so high, no one other than companies who base much of their biiz on Solaris would have any interest in seriously looking at the source.
... to encourage people to get the source and put it Gnutella ?
C'mon people, this is not open source, they were selling the source and are now cancelling the effort (who knows why). But by making little comments like that, you're making us look like a community of software pirates not open source advocates !
- sigs are for wimps.
and look where SGI is right now... 6 months of cash left, pushing Windows and Itanium machines... (what about VA Linux, they're doing really good, too, right?)
What happened to the innovative company that was once SGI? They became box movers... Except they thought they could compete with the likes of Dell, who're already accustomed to razor thin margins and no spending on R&D.
Yeah... Sun should forget all about developing an OS and great hardware, and switch immediately to shipping 1 to 2 processor Intel/Linux systems.... That's the ticket!
Will Solaris 9 ship GNOME as the default desktop environment or do you expect Sun to back away from GNOME? When does Sun plan to release Solaris 9 anyways?
cpeterso
They stop distributing the old programs. If you try to download an old version of Java, it advises you to get a newer version, or Star Office. Check it out on their website. They'll patch over holes, but they try to get you up and running the latest and greatest if possible.
Rather than deal with continued maintenance of products that have new versions out, Sun tends to ask its users to upgrade to the newest version, and enforce this by killing off access to the older versions. Personally, I see nothing wrong with this (though having an archive available is always nice). Who wants a tech support call for a modified version of an outdated product? Especially if the problem is one that is fixed in a later version.
Apple needs Java to work on Macs more than anything.
I'm a Java developer and glad about every 1.2 / 1.3 JDK that is available, but why do you think that Apple needs Java? It seems to me that Apple's systems are very much end-user-driven, so that Java isn't really much of an issue. Java never really made it to the desktop (Swing speed issues etc.)
Sun's whole corporate history shows their commitment to avoiding the vendor lock-in you are accusing them of. The decision to market Unix systems in the first place, the open specification of Sparc, the open licensing of NFS and NIS, the adoption of SVR4c the participation in CDE, and the Java spec development process all illustrate this,
This is a company that plays ball with the rest of the industry instead of following 70s-IBM and 90s-MS tactics. Sure, they have a good story on binary compatibility through a large range of hardware, better than anyone else's. But lock-in through binary compatibility is not where Sun is at.
They have ALWAYS been an enemy of Linux. Sun exists to sell Sparc boxes and Solaris. They wanted to sort-of help Linux to keep it as a buffer against MS. They didn't perceive Linux as a threat and that was their mistake.
Keep in mind that only a few days ago Compaq announced two items of great importance to Sun.
1. The transfer of the Alpha to Intel. Not just the chip, but the entire development group. This will give Intel so badly-needed expertese in the 64-bit arena. While the UltraSPARC isn't a match for the Alpha, they had Intel beated hands-down. This also kills the Alpha -- leaving only the Sparc and PPC as competitors for Intel (AMD, etc.) Sun is feeling the heat.
2. The impending release of their Sun migration tools. These allow much easier conversion of Solaris programs using the Solaris threading model to the Linux threading model.
IBM has been going great guns for Sun -- remember the Telestra announcement? Replacing how many Sun servers with a single IBM Mainframe running Linux S/370?
Sun is in everyone's sights. Their problem is McNealy's ego only allows him to perceive Microsoft (Bill Gates, actually) as the only possible enemy. The rest are unworthy of his attention.
That cute little penguin is going to cause a serious eclipse in the near future. World Domination doesn't mean just Microsoft.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
>Not a good point since Nortel's stock has been plummeting and they have had huge layoffs in the past few months.
:-)
:-)
I'm quite familiar with their stock, as I work for their major competitor (Lucent). Out stock has done its own nose-dive as well.
Neither stock price has any bearing on the fact that they both still do about $5-6 Billion each per QUARTER in gross business.
Both use Sparc/Solaris workstations/servers (dependingon capacity) to manage their switches and the switch networks. Both end up selling more than a few low- to mid-range ( If you ever have run a real server, you would know that Linux is just a toy.
Thanks, that is exactly the attitude I am talking about.
I originally received Sun SysAdmin and NetAdmin certification on 2.6 and then took the "upgrade" to 8. I work mostly on workstations, embeded manufacturing systems and low-end servers and have done so consistantly since 2.4. I currently run this stuff in mission-critical environments. I *DO* know what I am talking about.
You are right, on LARGE systems (8+ cpus) Solaris is one of the best OSes around. I've also worked with IRIX on some big boxes and it, too is quite nice.
HOWEVER, given the right hardware, a properly tweaked Linux system is quite capable of handling damn near anything Solaris can do on low- to mid-end ( = 4 cpus ) workstations and servers.
THIS is the market that Sun was taking for granted. If their attitude continues, Linux will sneak up on them in the big-box arena in the next few years and they will be wondering what hit them.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Solaris is still sold (for a lot of money) with the large (16-way+) servers like the E10000.
Sun *DOES* care about the OS, because with Solaris they have a better lock on selling the hardware.
With Linux you can put it on your existing Sparc systems then migrate to (cheaper) Intel systems whenever the need arises. As long as they are low-end ( =4 cpus ) workstations, you won't have a problem. The software should run with just a recompile. Linux is a foot in the door and a nail in the coffin for Sun.
Look at Red Hat's latest PR -- about their quarterly results. Notice the bullet point about Nortel contracting for support to switch from "proprietary Unix" (that is Sun Solaris, BTW) on their Network Management Systems to Red Hat Linux 7.1.
Remember IBM's announcement about Telestra -- the Scandanavian ISP that replaced a room full of Sun Servers with a single S/390 running Linux?
McNealy is so focused on Bill Gates he doesn't realize that the cute little penguin he was so generously helping out is about to rip his leg off.
IBM jumped on the bandwagon; Sun seems to have an "oh, isn't that cute -- a little OS" opinion of Linux.
Sun had it's moment but it is gone. An eclipse is coming.
Linux. Join us or die.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Low spec PC for single user, Blade 1000 workstation, $1000.
Medium spec PC, eg small website, Ultra 5 or 10, under $10,000.
Higher spec PC, eg Database, Enterprise 220, under $30,000.
Yes, the high end stuff is very expensive, but then there are no PC generic equivilants for the E10K.
YYeah sorryy, bounced on the 0 keyy one time to manyy.
Non sequitor. What does M$ have to do with a stable platform maintained by a competent company?
Get thee to an auto parts store. See that big rack of maintenance manuals?
Now that I make good money as a software geek, I pay other people to do my vehicle maintence; but when I was in grad school, rolling nickles to come up with lunch money, I checked the maintenance manual (and its diagrams) pretty often in order to keep my clunker running.
And engine blueprints are several orders of magnitude less useful than source code; you can't modify an engine with just the blueprints, and the blueprints don't give you full documentation of the engine's behavior.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
How does a platform that requires weekly rebooting when simply used as a light duty client (I only run Exceed, Netscape, and Bloated Notes on my Win2k box at work) qualify as "stable"? (Perhaps when compared to Windows 95, when I had to reboot daily (at least)?)
I also thouroughly enjoy the way that a slow DNS lookup will cause the entire machine to lock up - leaving me unable to even move a window on the screen - until it resolves, or times out.
I won't even discuss the hideousness of the user interfaces.
Competent in marketing, yes. Competent in the crafting of a decent computer operating system, no.Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Perhaps because you have to pay for Forte C++ to compile it? Have you looked at how much Forte C++ costs? You check it out yet?? Good thats why it wasn't a BIG success. Sure you can find a bug or add a module or do whatever but if you can't compile it what good is it to you?
Why, that reminds me of a Red Hat box booting up and saying "Starting sendmail..." and then hanging. You can't get to any other login screens, you have to reboot and do Interactive startup and not start sednmail.
Sure, it's easy to fix, but MS aren't the only ones who do it..
To be honest, compared to Debian it sucks. I have been told that Solaris is better than Linux for some things, but for everything I do, Debian is/was clearly superior.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
> Solaris still has the most scalable SMP tech. There's a lot to be learned by groveling through that code.
*cough* *cough*
Sorry, Solaris doesn't even come close to having the most scalable SMP code. That honor belongs to SGI's IRIX (currently 512P on Origin 2000 and Origin 3000) and Cray's Unicos/mk (approximately 1800P on the largest T3E I'm aware of). A measly little 64P Solaris UE10000 system cannot come anywhere making that claim.
Note: Yes, there may technically be some larger SMP systems in existence running one-off operating systems; I am limiting my discussion to commercially available (at some point) systems.
I will agree, however, that there is a lot to be gained from reading Solaris code. However, I wouldn't advise doing so and then bringing ideas into your operating system kernel of choice. Sun lawyers may very well have a heyday with you if that happens.
Cyrano de Maniac
GPL/LGPL and SISSL
In part, their site states:
Dual licensing of the OpenOffice.org source code provides open and free access to the technology both for the GPL community and for other developers or companies that cannot use the GPL. Dual license is common practice in open source projects like Perl and Mozilla. Through the combined use of GPL/LGPL and SISSL, developers will have a high degree of freedom yet compatibility and interoperability will be preserved. You can freely modify, extend, and improve the OpenOffice.org source code. The only question is whether or not you must provide the source code and contribute modifications to the community. The GPL and SISSL licenses allow different ranges of flexibility in this regard, but in the end, regardless of the license used, any and all incompatible changes must be published openly.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
What does M$ have to do with a stable platform maintained by a competent company?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It's called Windows 2000. MS might not be the "nicest" company in the world, but nobody looking at the success of Windows would argue that the are not "competent."
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You probably have it misconfigured. I have three machines here running Win2K, and two of them run some pretty heavy duty apps (Photoshop, 3D Studio, Visual C++). Hasn't crashed on me yet. The majority of people on the web (either through posting or doing reviews or whatnot), the "word on the street" if you will, says that Win2K is damn stable. Thus, personal experience (neither mine nor yours) counts for nothing.
As for MS's operating systems, Linux could learn somethings from Win2K (just as Win2K could learn things from Linux) Win2K sheduler gives much better response to GUI apps than Linux's does, its GUI is much smoother, and some of the internals (look in an OS case study) are much more suited to a desktop OS. On the other hand, Win2K could stand to dump the Win32 environment subsystem paradigm, and pick up XFS and UVM while it was at it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I dont see why anyone would need he source to Solaris. It cost $75 to look at it and you couldnt do much with it anyway. I guess for a learning experienceit would be o but you have the BSD's and Linux to look at (and also Minix) if you wanted to learn something. I suppose a company developing apps for Solaris could use it to find out some better design techniques for there apps to work with Solaris but to license it and then have to pay to access it, I am not suprised it was not a big sucess. Why pay for something that you can EASILY get for free from the alternative Unix's?
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
It seems Solaris is washing its hands of this code completely - not even going to support it. For all intents and purposes, its as close to true abandonware as you can get.
:)
Shame on you for smoking such wonderful stuff and not sharing.
Seriously, they are not abandoning Solaris which is where the label abandonware comes into play. They are just not offering the source to Solaris any longer. They still support Solaris.
Perhaps they're gearing up for a greater availability of Solaris 9 source code off www.sunsource.net...
The Solaris 8 source code forums weren't a great success. I'd have appreciated some notice about this though, this is the first that I've heard about this.
It's be a pity for Sun to completely pull out of making the source code available, but I did hear recently that they're suspending projects so as to make people available to work on projects that actually make money, what with no recruitment going on in SUNW at all, I guess some projects have to fall by the wayside.
Oh, I don't know. I'd kind of like to see this (ALSA) replace OSS as the UNIX standard.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't mean that there's nothing in Linux/BSD/whatever that shouldn't be in Solaris, but do you actually think Sun would copy and paste GPL'd code into the SunOS 5.9 source tree, compile and forget? Highly highly unlikely.
as a commerical software vendor with your source totally closed, you're able to integrate GPLed code without anyone knowing about it. I'd keep a close eye on Sun over the next 12 months.
What a joke. Firstly, check out http://www.sunsource.net. Secondly, check out Sun's contribution to the internet and Unix in general over the last 20 years. Thirdly, Solaris source code may not even be pulled from the publics eyes, good presumption there. Fourthly, Solaris source code will presumably still be available to third level institutions and Sun customers. And finally, Sun have got so many good engineers that the idea of Sun taking any of, say, Linux and integrating it into the Solaris kernel is a joke.
You can't emulate the success of the Open Source community by trying to copy some superficial part of it without "Getting It."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Sun offers the Solaris OS at basically zero cost, because more people will buy their hardware if they have an operating system to run on them.
If you want to run Linux on your Sparc, Sun is not going to try to stop you- anything that encourages you to buy their hardware is a good thing.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Sun offers the Solaris OS at basically zero cost, because more people will buy their hardware if they have an operating system to run on them.
If you want to run Linux on your Sparc, Sun is not going to try to stop you- anything that encourages you to buy their hardware is a good thing.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Face it: if Sun were a software company selling Solaris, they'd be long since dead. They may have brilliant kernel hackers, but the userland feels unmaintained and obsolete.
Linux on commodity hardware offers vastly more bang for the buck than traditional Unix on high-end hardware. The only logical role for high end hardware is problems that do not lend to parallelization, such as databases. And yet Oracle is attacking this problem space via parallelization too.
There is an irrational attachment to 'big iron' which is not going to survive continued economic downturn and the increased visiblity of Linux solutions. Believe me, I know exactly the people you're talking about, and many are talented sysadmins. But they are a little isolated from the outside world - they still speak in terms of 'PC vs Unix' and merge the shortcomings of Windows with the shortcomings of the PC platform in their discussion.
I was thinking more along the lines of "Sun should follow SGI's lead". Why not drop Solaris, have engineers go to town on Linux for Sparc, and sell some support licenses and servers. Isn't that Sun's business model anyways?
-no broken link
Which part of "Linux for Sparc" needed to be bolded?
-no broken link
Interesting tidbit: Talked to a Linux distributor a couple of days ago that wanted to do a "demo" type Linux CD. They wanted permission from Sun to put a DEMO version of StarOffice onto the CD ROM as well.
Sun said "No". When asked why, they answered something along the line "because we want to make money again with it".
Weird.
-Martin
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Another thing to consider is code compatibility. I've been working for months to make a large government application work with GNU tools. It's taking worlds of effort, which I will share if no one beats me to it, but that just might be my fault. Most science users consider the usual day of install time under solaris painful. Sun has support to help these people out when all else fails. If it were not for hardware compatibility problems, I would have gotten a copy of this for my x86. NT? You must be kidding me!
They may loose some income from people who want to just run mail and web servers, but that will not kill them. At least, I hope not. I'd hate for their designs to get bought up by people who make blue man adverts.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Currently Sun is one of the companies that doesn't know quite what to make of little free OS we know and love.
Ever hear of a little company called Cobalt? Or a little software venture called iPlanet?
Sun get's Linux. It has for quite some time. The pressure to adopt it isn't as great as other companies because Solaris is the #1 commercial Unix platform.
I'll bet a fair number of those JavaOne demo's also run on Solaris, NT, AIX, etc... That's sorta the point. Demo'ing them on Linux let's the marketing people leverage the hype. Sort of the marketing version of karma-whoring. Leveraging the hype is pretty much all they're after too, as most ISV's are having a difficult time figuring out how to make money selling software for Linux. Porting to Linux is easy, it performs well, and grabs attention. But the people on the other platforms are more likely to write big checks.
Temkin
It's obvious why a company would release their code under a nominally open source license - they are looking for geeks to improve their code for free. Equally pathetic are the licenses of Inferno and Plan9: Bell OWNS your code, if you make any "improvements". Sun pulls this same kind of monkey business with their community source license, if I'm not mistaken. /*Rant
People don't want to code for(not ON) a license-hampered OS in their free time, because there is not much of a sense of satisfaction in helping a large corporation for free. Netscape, Apple, and all the rest including Microsoft are attempting to beguile us with their so-called embrace of open source. Fuck that!
Rant*/
It's too close to Microsoft "Shared Source" thing. They are not going to get lots of people contributing, like Linux and other OSS software has. Major companies (IBM, HP) are less likly to make contributions to commercial software that directly competes with software of their own, etc.
Not to mention it was a half hearted attempt. It was too much like a AOL "me too!" post. They were late to the party, and wanted to make people think they belonged.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
It was my impression that many of the backend systems were Linux, especially for the J2ME applications.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I was watching the JavaOne keynote's last week and something struck me as interesting. While JavaOne is a conference sponsered by Sun, the majority of the products that had on-stage demos were running under the Linux OS. Not all of them, but a lot of them were.
I thought it was interesting how people kept coming up on stage and telling the Sun reps that this that or the other thing ran with a Linux backend. Once or twice they had the comment "oh....it runs on Linux?"
If I worked for Sun, I would have taken that as a wakeup call. Currently Sun is one of the companies that doesn't know quite what to make of little free OS we know and love.
I personally never thought it really made sense to release the Solaris code. Maybe they are starting to come up with a real open source strategy...at least we can hope.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Anything they had done would be convered by patents, which, thankfully, expire after a relatively short period of time.
Not if the Big Faceless GGM Corporations Who Are Above Any Single Country's Law have their way like Disney did with its extension of copyright from 56 years tops to 95 and beyond.
And yes, I am writing my representative letters. "I vote. And so do thousands of librarians who want the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act repealed."
Will I retire or break 10K?
How can you upload anything to a gnutella server?
If you're referring to the decentralized nature of gnutellanet or winmx, you can fix this by running a client on several boxen with a shload of bandwidth and then get them listed in the various trackers, so that what you are trying to serve is only a few hops away from users. If you're really serious about publishing content on gnutella, you can colo the boxen, ftp the files in, and kill -HUP the gnutella server to make it update its share list.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ordering for Foundation Source downloads and kits will cease on June 29th, 2001.
The secure chat and code-exchange site will cease on June 30th.
Why are we ending the Solaris 8 Foundation Source Program?
Product sign-ups have fallen below an acceptable level
Budget cuts are necessitated by current economic climate
What does this mean for Sun customers and ISV's?
Current Foundation customers can continue to use already licensed source
Partner Source is still available (for US$50,000)
Other source programs available at www.sunsource.net
Has no effect on Free Binary Program
No more Foundation releases expected ("we may review decision in future")
--- .. sometimes I guess you don't know what you've got until it's gone ..
Apparently Sun was planning on releasing updates and patches for Solaris 8 as well as Solaris 9 in Foundation Source
big hint: read something on tuning - I'd recommend Cockcroft or take a peek at something like this ..
...perhaps Sun should follow Apple's lead? I dunno if they can really do that, and I guess there's no money involved... but Apple seems to be benefitting. Of course, there are a lot of differences. It mean quite a "paradigm shift."
I think it's very useful for certain types of users to have access to the Solaris source -- not because they want to compile it, but because they want to be able to see how certain things work. When I was doing much more in-depth work with the TCP/IP stack (including TCP parameter tuning) and ATM on Solaris, it would have saved me trouble to be able to get a look at some of the source to better understand how certain things were behaving rather than having to tweak parameters semi-blindly and see what ended up working best. If had still been doing that work when Sun released the source code I would have been all over it. I'm sure I can't be alone, there must be other Solaris users out there with similar needs. These types of users also tend to be very proactive about helping Sun resolve bugs, and I would not be surprised if the speed of implementation of bug fixes has been improved with their help.
As a side note, I also know that Sun had distributed source to certain (usually educational) institutions over the years prior to this program, including UCLA.
...and nothing more... but as a commerical software vendor with your source totally closed, you're able to integrate GPLed code without anyone knowing about it. I'd keep a close eye on Sun over the next 12 months.
Sun's own Java people are very aware of how silly it is to pretend that Solaris and Java are tied together. But they have no say in the matter. When I worked there, everyone's favorite bitch was that they only had resources for three reference implementations of Java, and one of those three had to be Solaris/86 -- an OS almost nobody uses. It accounts for about 1% of JDK downloads.
Have you ever noticed that some of the installation instructions for the Windows JDK seem to be written by people who don't have access to Windows systems? That's because they don't. Never mind that 90% of JDK downloads are by Windows users....
__
It seems Solaris is washing its hands of this code completely - not even going to support it. For all intents and purposes, its as close to true abandonware as you can get. This would actually may be the perfect way to get a case like this into court and get some precedent. Solaris wants nothing to do with it, what should they care if someone else does? Theyre not even going to pretend to care about the code. Personally, if I were one of their developers and had that rug pulled out from under me, Id be flattered if a community took it up and made it something better (if only to see someone stick to Solaris :)
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
guilty as charged :) responded a little too quickly to the post I guess!
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
I think you mean the Blade 100, because the Blade 1000 is certainly a lot more than $1000 and is a lot higher spec than that IDE junk Ultra5/10. It is more of a successor to the Ultra 80.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Some geeks seem to think that everybody has all the time available to tweak and twiddle with everything they can get their hands on, while all most of us (this includes a lot geeks as well) want is a stable platform that is maintained by a competent company so we don't have to. Hence the real-life success of companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Sun...and the less-than-spectacular interest in Solaris Source Code.
When was the last time you looked at the blueprints of your car's engine, anyway ?
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
You do have to fax them an 11 page PDF file though, sign away one of your children, take a blood oath. -bbh
...it's because they finally figured out the "Network is NOT the computer".
I remember trying to get past an OS/2 2.11 boot failure with a second monitor on an IBM MDA card and getting thoroughly blown off by IBM because I was trying to run an IBM OS on supported IBM hardware. The attitude of that one employee represented IBM's then arrogance coupled with incompetence that caused them to lose to MS. And, much as I hate Microsoft's dominance, IBM deserved it.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Perhaps the often prohibitive cost of most sun hardware is that which contributes most to the failure of this effort. Had an effort been made to make the hardware as accessible as the software maybe things would be different.
I agree. With the progress of artificial intelligence, it won't be too many years before everything is open source, whether the software's creators want it to be or not. Besides, who ever said war was unethical ;-). Abide by the laws you think are right and not by those you think are wrong.
because you have to pay 75$ just to pay for the CD! Are they plated in gold leaf with diamond dust sparkles?
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
They can't sell it for 80 bucks, but when Kevin Mitnick stole it, is was worth 80 million bucks.
We should each mail the district attorney in the mitnick case a copy of the Solaris Source code. Or maybe we could send it to John Markoff...
sigh.
Too bad about the program. Wish they would reconsider.
No one has mentioned its potential value as an educational resource. There's probably quite a few nuggets of knowledge to glean inside its source code. Makes me wonder if any Linux kernel hackers have bothered to take a look.
Its been a while since I've been in CS class, and the stuff they covered back then doesn't appear to closely describe what they do now internally. It would really be cool if an OS professor would go over the code, and extract stuff for use in class. Then again, that would be time & work (and only for students, *pffft*); its much easier to gloss over details and talk in terms of "concepts"...
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Of course, the examples you give have little (or nothing) to do with software. Neither the wright brothers, Daniel Bernoulli, nor Nikolas Otto ever wrote a program. Anything they had done would be convered by patents, which, thankfully, expire after a relatively short period of time.
And, quite frankly, if I found a software program licensed under an agreement that I didn't like, I'd either not use the program or put up with the license. It's quite simple, in fact.
Frankly, I feel bad for you that you feel the need to steal, and then to justify your actions as anything other than theft.
Dinivin
"Get it while you still can, bzip it, and upload to a gnutella server!"
Vardamir, this brings a whole new dimension to p2p networking.
-- sigs are like parking spaces - all the good ones are occupied
Quit whining and learn how to use ed. It's not so different from vi. Anyone who comes from a Linux/Windows background is not going to like Solaris...generally because they're installing the OS for fun, and Solaris is not an OS for fun and games. Like you said, Sun spends its time in the system components, not in userland. Get over it and get in the habit installing some GNU tools right after installing the recommended patch cluster, if that's your thing.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Carl G. Jung
--
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia