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OpenBSD (Still) Seeks UltraSparc III Docs From Sun
An anonymous reader writes "There is a very interesting article on kerneltrap regarding OpenBSD's lingering battle with Sun over UltraSparc III documentation (that's right ... it still hasn't been resolved). Jeremy Andrews relates his efforts to get a position from Sun on the matter. In summary, he was completely stonewalled ... and that is exactly what makes the article so noteworthy."
The whole story leaves me with the idea that sun hopes to get most of the expensive development done by the OS community as they are preparing their own linux distro. As such nothing wrong with that..
For OpenBSD they couldn't care less other than to keep them waiting and to keep possible competition at a distance.
Just my first, uninformed, impression..
Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!
Wasn't Sun in part started by Bill Joy of the *original* BSD fame, of which OpenBSD is an off-shoot? You'd think that Bill would show the OpenBSD guys some love.
Yes, I know Bill Joy creating BSD was a long time ago but there is no need for such duplicity and passive hostility. Let's get it together Sun !
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Sun has always seemed to be in the bussiness of sharing , but oftens seems to do a stab in the back
No, Sun are in the business of making money. All the cool stuff they do has to be paid for one way or the other. A fab is possibly the most expensive artifact on the planet, short of an aircraft carrier. Sun are perfectly willing to provide documentation to anyone willing to meet them halfway and sign an NDA, which is fair enough, since they need to protect their opportunity to earn a return on their investment. (Note that I said opportunity, not right).
This is not a flame or a troll, but the OpenBSD people's position is "we want you to respect our terms, but we aren't willing to respect yours". Well, you can't have your cake and eat it - and no amount of ranting will change that.
Sun seems to be a company with an identity crisis. Are they a hardware company that dabbles in software? Are they a software company who dabbles in hardware?
Either way, they are looking at a bleak future considering the proliferation of Linux, and the availability of cheap, relatively high performance x686 hardware.
If Sun is a software company, they are probably not comfortable with the fact that Solaris, recently the 'standard' OS for low-end scientific/technical computing (at least in the semiconductor industry) is being passed over in favor of the cheaper (faster) alternative Linux.
If Sun is a hardware company, they should be worried. The semiconductor company I work for, which previously used Sun machines exclusively, has found that a dual XEON running Linux outperforms the new SunBlades it owns. The blades cost about 4-5 times more than the XEON systems, and have about half the speed for our applications.
I am not surprized if Sun is starting to feel that it has to protect itself.
If it's not one thing, it's Steve's Mother
Because the Berkley'd code can be used in other commercial software with just a little copyright message, whilst GPL'd code can be used in other commercial software, but then requires the source code of that software to be released.
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
No, you have that wrong. The OpenBSD position is "What ARE the terms?" -- they haven't been offered anything at all.
I think they have been ignoring his requests because they realize Theo is not going to be happy with an NDA, and is going to call the bluff. On one hand, Sun says it's an open architecture, but on the other hand - they're telling people they need to sign an NDA to get the data. I believe Sun would have offered him the NDA a long time ago if they thought he would sign it -- just like they've done with other (Linux) developers - but they probably realize it's not going to work like that with him. I don't think Theo is as concerned about the actual documentation; I think his driving motivation here is to get Sun to "practice what they preach."
Theo is of the opinion that if you're going to say something is a certain way, it better be. Sun will need to either ignore him indefinately, thus avoiding the whole NDA paradox -- or they will change the policy and truly offer the documention in an open manner, as they claim.
What I find interesting is the comment near the end of the article that basically says Theo thinks they have everyone sign an NDA to avoid public discussions of architecture bugs in the US3. Am I the only one that remembers Sun having customers sign NDA's so they could get their faulty UltraSparc chips replaced with bad cache? I can't find a link to past discussions about this, but...
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...