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Sun Mulling GPL for Solaris

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the but-not-anytime-soon dept.

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.

2 of 374 comments (clear)

  1. Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0 by Craig+Ringer · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Solaris 9/x86 can be obtained for $0 by chegosaurus · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.