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Sun Mulling GPL for Solaris
comforteagle writes "According to this article in InfoWorld, Sun Microsystems is considering open sourcing Solaris by changing licenses to the GPL. What kind of impact would this have on those of you considering opting out of Unix for Linux? Red Hat and others have openly targeted Solaris users to switch." By the end of the article, the change seems rather unlikely to happen, but it's still interesting to see what changes this could bring about.
http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get. html
It's pretty fussy about hardware etc, though, and very obviously not the equal of Solaris/Sparc.
This can be done if (and only if) Sun buys out SCO with the money they recently got from Gates and Co. by signing partnership with them. Sun's been really sneaky for the last few years because they obviously don't know which way they should go. Scott McNealy doesn't want opensource to prevail, but he's been *pretending* to be a part of it. Lame.
For personal/evaluation/educational/etc uses, it already is.
If solaris were available for free, i have a feeling many students would install it on their system, just to more easily use these apps if for nothing else.
Well, you can actually get Solaris for free already.
Speak before you think
Sadly, I must disagree. Modern apps - especially GUI apps - often depend heavily on services and libraries from the major toolkits and desktop environments, and this makes them less source-portable.
... well, that's another story and one that's much more of a problem in the distro forking area.
It is hard to write an app that'll run on even 2-year-old versions of the same distro it was written on.
OTOH, this is not due to forking at all, but rather the lack of care about stable APIs, combined with rapid release cycles, in a lot of open source software. This has it's advantages - ugly decisions don't lurk forever (witness Windows' APIs by comparison), and things can evolve quickly.
I'd call "forking" a secondary issue for app developers, over trying to support distros over more than about 2 releases.
As for ABIs
You may be aware of this already, but try FreeSBIE
It's a FreeBSD Unix LiveCD with a desktop environment (XFCE I think). It doesn't work properly on my nForce2 PC (no network and consequently no internet) but it certainly works.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I do think this move is benefitial to all.
Please don't flame me for bad-mouthing Linux, I'm a diehard Linux admin myself but I still think Linux has much to catch up in enterprise computing.
We've a Linux cluster which has a critical bug in mounting the share disk which has filesystem. Sometime when one node down the mount point is not released to another node which is supposed to take up the process, thus result in critical failure.
This is all kernel problem(or limitation), and we don't have problem with non-fs type disk(raw disk). Therefore we must use raw disk where possible in cluster, but we don't have choice when some apps require a filesystem(e.g. like infracture database in Oracle's forsaken Real Application Cluster (RAC). Good name huh)
The engineer who diagnosis this problem told me they've no such problem with similar setup with solaris so they THOUGHT it's okay in Linux. Ahem, there goes millions dollars for paying their great product(*cough* Oracle RAC *cough*).
I expect more of such problems could be solved when those companies specialized in enterprise bringing back good stuffs to Linux, and GPL.
There is an unofficial KDE for Windows project IIRC...
though i suppose it probobly isn't that easy to do
so you know if you realy don't care what its running on...
NeWS is unfortunately encumbered by Adobe licenses, and therefore will not [ever?] be a candidate for any form of source release. Adobe is not friendly to such ideas.
-30-
It is. Now stop trolling. (Sound & Multimedia --> System Notifications. Done).
Specifically, Solaris is the bundle of SunOS and the X Window System. In the olden days that meant SunOS+OpenWindows (SunOS4, or Solaris 1.x) and now that means SunOS+CDE or SunOS+GNOME depending on the vintage of SunOS5-based Solaris.
We really don't need the majority Solaris' userland tools. All we want is some stuff in the kernel, and occasional user-space tool which is required for changing options and/or utilizing that kernel functionality.
With the amount of FSF-copyrighted GNU+GPL tools the average person puts on a Solaris system to make it enjoyable to use, it might as well be called GNU/Solaris already.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Mac OS X? ;)
Join the Free Software Foundation
For the period ended September 30th, the two cash cows of Client (i.e. Windows) and Information Worker (Office) produced operating income of $2.48 billion on revenue of $2.89 billion, and $1.88 billion on $2.38 billion respectively.
MSN lost $97 million on $531 million, CE/Mobility was out $33 million on $17 million revenues (always a good trick, this kind of stuff), and the home of Xbox, Home Entertainment, dropped $177 million on revenues of $505 million. Business Solutions, which includes Navision and Great Plains, and is a sector Microsoft hopes will contribute great things in the future, lost $68 million on $107 million.
Part 1: Whether SCO or Novell has the copyrights to SysV, SCO has licensing rights broad enough to release it under the GPL themselves.
.
Part 2: A while back, Sun bought a broad license to Unix from SCO. Exactly how broad nobody knows, but SCO at one point publically said that it immunizes Sun from the sort of lawsuit they launched against IBM. Since that involved IBM GPLing what SCO claims is System V code . .
Again, the exact terms of Sun's license are not known, so this is speculation. But it is intriguing, isn't it?
With NeWS (and Display Postscript), the widgets are drawn using PostScript commands. When you click on a button in X, it sends a message to the app, which then draws the widget and sends it to the X server. When you click on a button in a PostScript display environment, the button redraw is handled by the interpreted script, and a single event is sent to the application triggering an event. Interface latency is a lot lower, since the interface drawing is all handled by the terminal.
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"Solaris itself is based on BSD software."
Um, no it isn't.
SunOS was based on BSD code. Solaris was a clear and distinct cut over, using SysV code.
(Keeping in mind that SunOS=SunOS 4.x=Solaris 1, and Solaris=SunOS 5.x=Solaris 2/7+)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
And of course every UNIX software package is available for all of these because they are practically identical.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
A while back I had a phone interview with the product manager of Solaris. I asked him if Solaris would ever be Free Software (or at least open-source) someday. He said that you can get the Solaris source if you need it, but it can never be under the GPL or similar Free Software licenses because they use so much code from other companies that contain trade secrets and otehr things that Sun hasn't the right to "give away." He specifically listed Kodak as one example because Solaris 9 includes code that Kodak wrote and licensed to Sun -- it had something to do with color matching or something like that.
I guess they could GPL Solaris minus the third-party proprietary code, whatever it may be, but then you're not getting the real Solaris anymore.
Novell ran into this problem when they bought the rights to the UNIX SVR4 source. There was some talk at the time of making it GPL, but there were so many agreements with vendors like Intel and Sun that prohibited opening up the code that it was impossible to accomplish.
Sun should have opened up Solaris years ago, if it were possible. Then people could have manipulated the source according to their needs and Sun would have sold more hardware as a result. Solaris adds value to Sun hardware -- that's its sole purpose -- and Sun missed the chance to really capitalize on that.
-JemIBM has been and is still paying royalties to SCO (who sends 95% of it to Novell). As IBM says, "irrevocable, fully paid-up, and perpetual".
IIRC, Sun paid something like $100 Million for the full rights to System V. No other UNIX vendor has ever claimed to have the rights that Sun has -- and they would if they could because Sun has used this as marketing point consistently over the years.
I think they can, they've bought very extensive rights about SVR4 from AT&T years ago. And they got based for paying SCO some money some time ago. So I expect they have all the rights to open source Solaris, at least the SVR4 parts.
I beg to disagree - Solaris cotains a lot of code from entities other than AT&T/USL/SCO (even though they have unlimited rights to use the code, i.e. no royalties due to SCO - they don't have the rights to distribute the code to others). One example would be the PostScript code in xsun.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
...Linux developers take all the interesting bits from Solaris and port them to the Linux kernel--then you get all the stability etc of Solaris, but with Linux.
Except stability (like security) is not a feature and thus can't simply be grafted from one code base to another.
OS X's dock has roots in NeXTStep. NeXT made significant advances and utilized many cool stuff such as Objective-C and a very nice user interface. Also, the new file selector is NeXT based as well.
The UI has been lauded much and many many open source software copies it. Consider WindowMaker for one. It copies NeXT interface including dock and the file selector. Being an avid WindowMaker fan, Mac OS X user interface feels right at home.
It sounds like you are being ignorant of roots and geneology of things. You know, things didn't start with windows 95.
Young ones nowadays...
for those interested, this is a cool solaris resource too, as well as the software companion cd from sun.com:
http://www.sunfreeware.com/
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November