OpenBSD Requests UltraSPARC III Documentation

An anonymous submitter writes "OpenBSD wants to run on all hardware. They've asked Sun for documentation on the UltraSPARC III processors over and over, but been stonewalled. Theo recently asked users to talk to Sun about this issue. A fairly complete thread archive can be found here. The real kicker is that Sun has released this documentation through an NDA to Linux developers..."

Comments

Theo's diplomacy

[Outland Traveller]

Theo de Raadt writes:

> PS No, I don't work for Sun, and I'm not in bed with them. But
> working for a LARGE company has taught me many things about
> Bureaucracy, and two of those are: 1) Assume a lack of action before
> an action (i.e., things tend *not* to happen in a bureaucracy), and 2)
> if you can, pointing to a thing is almost always better than asking
> for an unknown.

No, you misunderstand. We've tried so hard; that is no excuse.
Perhaps this will teach them to be less opaque.

I think there are some times when Theo's style is dead on, like with the ipf filter. However, in this case it may not be the most constructive way to effect a change.

Re:Heh

[honold]

Maybe if the OpenBSD guys could get SMP working or something, someone might take them seriouesly

someone like sun?

openssh, created by the openbsd project, is a standard part of solaris 9. gripe about smp all you want - i would prefer they focus on security and crypto - but your bias isn't applicable on this point.

while sun should provide this kind of documentation anyway, it's absurd that they don't provide it to the very people that freely provided them with tools they have rebadged as their own (sunssh) and tout as a feature.

Re:Heh

[Arandir]

Even Sun knows where the future lies.

Yeah, in the buzzword bandwagon. Linux is good press. People will write article about Sun moving to Linux. But no one outside of a small community has even heard of BSD. It won't play well in the press. Since Sun is a publicly traded company, they NEED good and constant press. Since Linux is the current tech media darling, it only makes sense to latch on to Linux.

I'd rather have the OpenBSD guys auditing linux code instead

I wish SOMEONE would audit the Linux code. And I wish someone would audit the GNU code that typically surrounds it. But OpenBSD is a separate project. There are at least ten times as many Linux developers as OpenBSD developers. Surely one or two of them are capable of auditing their own project.

Jawn! You tell them Theo ;)

[Carl]

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=103 830199306037&w=2

> I'm sorry you don't yet believe that we are striving to be a traditional
> company that works well with the Open Source community. Most of our
> efforts to date have been in the software arena, and I think some of
> what you ran into was the trailing edge of Open Source awareness (in the
> hardware business).

The other contributions from Sun are entirely irrelevant.

I don't care about Jinu, Jxta, Jboring, Jawn, or any of that
stuff.

I care about running on ultrasparc III.

No obligation

[0x0d0a]

it's absurd that they don't provide it to the veyr people that freely provided them with tools that they have rebadged as their own (sunssh) and tout as a feature

Okay, it may not be a good idea for Sun, but I don't see why people are bashing Sun for it.

First, the OpenBSD people choose to release openssh under a BSD license. Sorry, but you *cannot* "expect" anything in return, not even morally (IMHO) -- the BSD license is not a "nicer sounding" closed license. Sun isn't obliged to do jack in return, any more than the BSD people are obliged to do jack in return for Sun donating personnel and resources to the GNOME Usability Project.

Second, Sun makes their money from hardware, not from selling Solaris. This is much more of an issue to Sun than the OpenBSD people. I can't understand why the OpenBSD people even care -- if Sun doesn't want the OBSD people to further increase the value of Sun hardware, that's a Sun issue, not an OBSD issue. Leave it.

Third, this article was fairly obviously designed to start a *BSD-Linux flamefest ("But those bad ol' Linux developers, *they* got the documentation"). I'd just ignore falling into the trap the article author laid for you, Slashdot posters.

Re:No obligation

[JulianD]

So the solution to this problem is to whine publically about Sun not coughing up the docs. I don't see how this really helps matters. As if Sun wasn't already reluctant enough to hand out docs to anyone developing for !(Linux) (trust me I know, I work with Jake Burkholder, one of the FreeBSD/sparc64 developers, and he's already gone through this rigamarole with Sun and their damn NDA).

Look, probably what will happen is that EVENTUALLY, someone who's smart enough and has enough time will read the source of the Linux kernel, figure out how things work, and recreate them in *BSD. Where there's a will, there's a way.