Solaris Might Become LSB-compliant

lvv writes "Register: according to Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, Solaris - one of the most proprietary Unixes, might become LSB compliant OpenSolaris. Also some info about future of Solaris desktop (Gnome)."

Comments

One of the most proprietary?

[Clue4All]

Solaris - one of the most proprietary Unixes

I'm going to take issue with this statement. Solaris isn't open source by any means, but it's a free download on SPARC and until recently Intel platforms, and you can download the source after agreeing to Sun's license. You can make changes to the source, recompile anything you damn well please, and contribute changes back to Sun (I have done so myself), the only thing you can't do is redistribute it. It's not on par in the open nature of Linux or FreeBSD, but compare this to DEC/Compaq/HP Tru64 or HP-UX or AIX where you pay a huge sum of money for a binary CD. I'd hardly call that the most proprietary.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[alsta]

While I realise this is a troll, I just wanted to point out to others that most commercial UNICES do NOT come with C/C++ compilers. UnixWare, OpenServer, HP-UX, Solaris, DEC UNIX etc. do not come with C/C++ compilers.

SunOS 4.x came with a K&R C compiler, but if you wanted ANSI C or C++ you needed to buy SparcWorks.

Virtually the only UNICES that come with C/C++ compilers are the free ones, e.g. distributed with GCC. But first of all, these can not be called 'Unix' and second, GCC is available for most of the above commercial platforms anyway, so the point is moot.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[larien]

Unix don't start GUI in single user mode.

Huh?? What makes you think that Solaris does? I've booted loads of workstations/servers into single user mode for maintenance and I've never seen it start up a GUI for it.

As others have pointed out, most other Unices don't come with a C compiler either, but I will allow the fact that it's strange to have /etc/vfstab instead of /etc/fstab. Then again, Solaris isn't unique in having certain files with different names in different places.

LSB means you can use source RPMs

[yerricde]

i thought solaris, being UNIX was posix complient, and so didnt need to be LSB compliant.

Any LSB conforming operating system can use source RPM packages that meet the LSB specs. This should expand the selection of free software that runs on the Solaris operating environment as well as make it easier to install.

All your Linux Standard Base are belong to us.

Re:Sun and standards

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget OpenOffice.org...

Re:wait a minite

[Empty Threats]

POSIX compliant and POSIX conformant are not at all the same thing.

Windows is something like 85% compliant but not conformant; OpenVMS is 100% compliant but not conformant.

I believe compliance is a matter of having the right API's in place, while conformance specifies just how things should work inside the OS.

You can already

[turgid]

RPM is provided on the Solaris Companion CD so you can already use source RPMs with Solaris.

Re:What the hell is LSB?

[strmcrw]

Linux Standard Base
Standards for directory structure, Object Format, libs, tools, shells, user & groups, system init and more
currently Caldera, Mandrake, RedHat && SuSE are LSB Certified

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[magellan]

"But with Spark's RISC instruction set and Sun's insistance on keeping both hardware and software closed, the cost/benefit balance was tipped."

First, Sun's hardware is not closed. Sun does not own SPARC. SPARC International does (www.sparcinternational.com). You can license the SPARC instruction set from them.

You can buy boards from Sun and build your own SPARC computers.

You can buy complete SPARC computers with no Sun hardware at all from Fujitsu.

You can obtain a license Solaris for single SPARC CPU systems for free (beer).

Solaris 8 is also available for Intel-based computers. Solaris 9 added no features of use for Intel, so the lack of availability for Solaris 9 is irrelavant.

Take a look at all the open source Sun projects

[magellan]

http://www.sunsource.net/

Developing LSB-compliant apps

[Anonymous Bullard]

Here's a quick howto by IBM developerWorks (in fact written by the actual chairman of the Linux Standard Base, George Kraft IV) on developing LSB-certified apps. It's got that October freshness about it...

Incidentally there's a link to a Solaris-to-Linux porting guide in the resources section of that article but LSB isn't even mentioned in that lengthy document...