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.

Comments

Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[Craig Ringer]

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.

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[chegosaurus]

It's nowhere near as fussy as people think (I've run it 100% fine on systems with *no* components on the HCL) and it's also a heck of a lot closer to the SPARC version than most people assume.

Sol x86 has never quite shaken off the bad reputation it gained around v2.5.1, when it sucked. So far as stability goes I'd take it over Linux any day, and if you give it decent hardware and know how to manage it, it's at least as quick.

As for GPLing it, as a user, I couldn't care less, as a skeptic, I don't believe it.

Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0

[chegosaurus]

This PROVES that you are directly related to solaris.

I make my living from it, if that's what you mean. I'm not employed by Sun though.

1. Why is linux unstable

It isn't, and I didn't say it was. I just think Solaris has the edge.

"if you give it decent hardware and know how to manage it

I make this point because a lot of /.ers have trialled Solaris by installing it on some crappy old 486 they have lying around, then deciding it's just a slow OS. It doesn't go as quickly on low end hardware as Linux or the BSDs. It *needs* decent hardware - they don't.

I also feel a lot of /.ers criticise Solaris because they don't know a lot about it. The amount of ill-informed opinion that one sees in Solaris /. threads is astonishing. Many Linux distributions come out of the box tweaked and hardened, with hundreds of apps and tools - Solaris doesn't. You need to know what you're doing with it, and put a bit of effort in to get the best out of it.

Re:education

[lpontiac]

If solaris were available for free

For personal/evaluation/educational/etc uses, it already is.

Please put down your flamethrower when I say...

[jsse]

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.

Re:switching

[DrLZRDMN]

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...

Re:NeWS

[buysse]

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.

Re:switching

[MrHanky]

Upon my last few installs of KDE, after hearing that god-awful sound scheme, I scampered off to the control panel to turn it off. This sort of task should theoretically be easy, right? It wasn't.

It is. Now stop trolling. (Sound & Multimedia --> System Notifications. Done).

Re:Just what we need.

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:switching

[byolinux]

Mac OS X? ;)

Re:never happen - oh yeah? I see it differently

[IWannaBeAnAC]

No, Windows and Office are the two (the only two) divisions that make money. Their financial breakdown is reported in lots of places, for example :

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.

Re:Can they even do this?

[SEE]

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?

Re:This could be disaster for linux, but...

[swordgeek]

"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+)

Can't happen because of other companies

[ValourX]

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.

-Jem

Re:Why?

[calidoscope]

Can Sun legally open-source all of Solaris?

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.