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

Sun and standards

[germinatoras]

A lot of us like to accuse Sun of being no better than Microsoft at a lot of things. This may be true on some level, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. While their motivation may be purely profit-driven, at least they are taking the approach of "Linux is getting popular, so we should be more like it", rather than "We need to squeeze every last $0.01 out of our locked-in customers".

Lately, Sun seems to be establishing a good track record for openness. They've created a fairly decent platform-independent programming language and development environment, and have made their Solaris environment look more like the other Unices out there. They are starting to come out with Linux products, or at least are talking about them. Even the source code to Solaris 7 used to be available for purchase on CD-ROM (although they may have backed away from that).

I hope that this is more than just a bid to recapture lost market share, but a real committment to play fair and adhere to open, published, and somewhat popular standards.

It only makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris doesn't make Sun any money. It's the hardware that keeps them afloat. Every developer they've got working on Solaris is a salary that doesn't go to working on the money-making hardware.

Running Linux as their main system allows them to get an OS for free. Granted, it's not quite as polished or stable as Solaris, but they don't have to apply any development effort, people are willing to give their work away for free!

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

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

And if they'd done that ten years ago, when I (and others) had a significant need to hack up some min or features and no budget to buy into their source distribution package it wouled have been wonderful - and might have headed off the obsolescence of Solaris.

Now, with Linux (+ GNU utilities + X + Gnome|KDE), and Free/Open/Net BSD, and Mach, and the rest of the Open Source world, it's too little too late.

I've reverse-engineered OSes on IBM, Control Data, DEC, Mac, and Altos when useful to add features or custom hardware. But with Spark's RISC instruction set and Sun's insistance on keeping both hardware and software closed, the cost/benefit balance was tipped.

I retired my last Solaris home machine on Dec 31, 1999, rather than upgrade it for Y2K.

At work:
- The serious networking software development is now done on NetBSD and variants. BSD desktops.
- The ASIC development is still partly on Solaris ... because we still have legacy machines from when that was all the tools would run on. But the simulation farm was ported to Linux long ago. New machines are PCs and the Sun boxes will run - mostly as legacy desktops - until they die or become too painful to maintain.
- And of course the administrators are still on Windoze - though it wouldn't surprise me to see them move to Linux in the near future.