Sun vs. OpenBSD?

An anonymous reader writes "CNet has an article up about OpenBSD trying to get documentation for Sun's UltraSparc-III processor. Basically Sun is giving them a bit of run around....There is some documentation available for the processor, but not enough to get things to boot."

Comments

Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

And why exactly should Sun open up the specs for competition that prices its products at $0 without at least getting a headstart with Solaris?

Re:Not surprising

[mike_the_kid]

The linux team apparently approached sun to show them the specs, Sun said "sign an NDA or no deal." Linux team signs, code goes under the GPL.

OpenBSD team approaches sun, Sun said "sign an NDA or no deal", OpenBSD says no, thats against the spirit of our project and the BSD license.

The interesting thing is that here the code is being used in an open source project (linux), but OpenBSD will not make use of it, because they respect the intent of the GPL.

Re:Not surprising

[doug_wyatt]

Once the info is out in GPL for Linux, can't the OpenBSD folks "steal" the knowledge from it? GPL protects the literal code (i.e. copyright) not the ideas contained within it. In the same sense that I can read your GPL'd code and re-implement it under the BSD license (or a comercial license), it would seem they could do the same with this.

Re:Not surprising

[bill_mcgonigle]

The interesting thing is that here the code is being used in an open source project (linux), but OpenBSD will not make use of it, because they respect the intent of the GPL.

It's right proper that the OpenBSD team doesn't want to run afoul of the GPL, but the GPL doesn't prohibit learning. The OpenBSD team should be able to derive a state machine from the Linux code, which would work like the UltraSparc, then program the OpenBSD code against the reverse-engineered state machine, without ever seeing UltraSparc specs, and certainly without ever copying GPL'ed code. It's likely to be sub-optimal, of course.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Respect the intent of the GPL? Not. They already tried to take the code and couldn't make it work by looking at Linux's.

But now they think they can play hardball with Sun's IP to get their way. They need to sign the NDR or stfu and figure it out themselves.
Better yet...stick to Intel/AMD.

Other OSs

[Apreche]

How come other OSs (not just Solaris) seem to have versions for UltraSparc. I know for a fact that Mandrake has a version that works fine on UltraSparc processors. I'm pretty sure BeOS can, and that many other linux/unixes can. I used to know a guy who had DOS running on a sun machine. If everyone else doesn't seem to have a problem why does BSD?

Re:All about the benji's

[Anonymous Coward]

The specs are available. Just sign the friggin' NDA. You can still publish the source code, but not reveal all the capabilities of the architecture until Sun has implemented them in Solaris. It's a good deal.

Theo's just pissed off because Sun doesn't have a page dedicated to him where all the necessary information will just magically appear when he needs it.

Re:All about the benji's

[dohcvtec]

anyone who pays $$$ for modern Sun kit is an idiot if they want to run anything other than Solaris on it
I can't speak for everyone, but it seems that things are usually the other way around: Sun hardware is a great platform on which to run OpenBSD. It's not as if "I have this SPARC machine, what OS should I run on it?" Rather, it's more like "I would like to run OpenBSD, what is a good hardware platform to run OpenBSD?" The 32-bit SPARC port of OpenBSD happens to be very mature and stable, and SPARC hardware (especially sun4m) is bulletproof. Now that the OpenBSD sparc64 port is moving further along, the developers really need official documentation to make progress. But to the OpenBSD developers it seems that Sun is ignoring them. IMO I would give it some time, as Sun is a large corporation, and things take time. Especially if Sun did not already have corporate policy/plans for relations with OpenBSD.

Re:Theo's just being an asshole - once more

[jbolden]

Since you are an AC I'd say its close to 100% that Theo has done way more for the community than you have.

As for the specifics. If Sun made it policy that it required an NDA to get Sparc 3 Theo would go away. That makes Sparc 3 a closed architecture. But Sun claims Sparc 3 is open. All Theo is doing is either:

a) forcing the reality to match their rhetoric (i.e. open the spec)
b) forcing them change the rhetoric

Sun has been all over the map in terms of open source and open standards. I think these public battles are forcing Sun as an institution to confont the contradictions in their idealogy and corporate culture.

Re:Sparc, BSD

[ilikehardhouse]

Linux has been edging into the low-to-mid end market, even stealing Sun's thunder with Oracle buy-in. Sun is being squeezed in the middle, and must decide whether they want to focus on the high-end enterprise, or the middle tier web/app/database servers.

yes and no. Oracle and Solaris/sparc still make for very large database servers - and you get support for it - at a cost of course. Sun has also made inroads into Linux, releasing it's own distribution (I know it's a rebadged redhat, but it's a start - and Sun's tech support will support both their linux distribution and Solaris directly).

AIX has it's association with Websphere and DB2.

Sun has it's association with iPlanet.

Re:All about the benji's

[Zapman]

From the article:
University of Alberta's Bob Beck said he is forced to buy out-of-date UltraSparc II-based E450 servers instead of newer UltraSparc III-based V880 machines for the university's SunSITE software exchange.

This seems odd to me: 1) OpenBSD doesn't support SMP yet, right? 2) v880's must have multiples of 2 CPU's (up to 8).

Sunsite might be better off grabing some of those 1U v120's, throwing a dual channal diff scsi card in there, and using an a1000 array (or maybe a t3 array... with only 1 cpu you probably need the hardware raid these offer rather than the d1000's or a5200's). More disk, less rack space, less power.

Now, the v880's rock. Great price point, 8 cpu's, 2 FC-AL planes for a total of 12x73 gig disks, 10 PCI slots (2 x 64bit/66MHz), onboard gigabit fiber... the list goes on. It's a great box (for more details, hit up store.sun.com, select servers, find 'low end servers', and select the v880. And note that that's 'list price'. You can get up to a third off of it from most resellers)

For reference:
4x itanium 800MHz dell 7150: 8x73 gig disks is $61,113.00.
4x usIII 900 MHz sun v880, 6x 73 gig fcal disks is $59,995.00

(That's the closest 'apples to apples' match I could make. I chose itanium vs usIII because they're both true 64 bit chips. Though the expansion of the Dell isn't as nice... the sun can add 4 more proc's and 6 more disks. The dell can add more memory... 32gig tops the sun v880, and 64 gig the dell)

sitting on the fence again

[Cyno]

Sun seems to enjoy playing both sides of this war, giving and helping when necessary to maintain community support while playing their cards with the big companies instead of turning their backs on them like the community would have them do. Sun is a good company overall, but I sure wouldn't want to work there again. They are rather insignificant these days, now that openoffice is GPL. If they get in bed with OSS before its too late they might stick around long enough to make some great change in the industry, assuming marketting and morons don't flood them out.

Capitalism is for the weak. If you need money to survive YOU SUCK!