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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.
No way. They wont gpl java, but they'll gpl solaris? Highly doubt it.
1. Sun would have to replace all of the UNIX code. They can't put that under the GPL, period (unless SCO and Novell agree it's ok ;-)
2. Solaris includes many products that Sun has incorporated over the years. Most of them would likely have to be replaced, since I doubt the contracts involved allow Sun to just GPL the whole mess.
3. They would just be asking to have SCO add them to the list of companies targetted for a "tainting" suit, though honestly Sun may not care.
In the end, I think it would make far more sense for Sun to open source their SMP code by working with IBM on modifications to Linux. Sun+IBM could probably get Linux deployed on both of their very-high-end boxes in short order.
The SMP stuff is, as far as I know, most of what's left that Solaris does better than Linux, so what's the point in open sourcing the whole OS anyway?
1. pretty nicely on expensive hardware, but I wouldn't choose it over Linux. (And in my job, I *do* basically have that choice.)
2. not really, no. The x86 version was available "free as in the cost of media" for a while, and it was a sad, sad joke.
Anyway, the article is pretty full of silly FUD, like this choice tidbit:
That's ridiculous of course, but more importantly, the only way in which it really makes sense is when you're still thinking about developing *propriatary* apps. If you can just recompile, pretty much *anything* that runs on one Linux distro will run on another. But if you're stuck in a shlepping-around-binaries mindset, yeah, there may be some difficulties.
Basically, they're still as clueless as ever. And we're certainly not going to see what Sun really needs -- an open source Java.
They probably wouldn't or couldn't GPL everything, but it might be more than enough to keep existing Solaris customers from migrating to Linux, maybe keep upgrading to Sun hardware, and maintain revenue streams that would eventually dry up anyway. Not to mention creating a new OS development community for which a tremendous knowledge and talent base already exists.
It could be an absolutely brilliant strategic move.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
I think it's obvious what would happen if Solaris were released under the GPL.
They would be able to dip in to all of the device drivers that Linux has today. That would happen first.
What would happen second is the standard cross-polination; anything that's substantially better in either one (think scheduler, VM etc) would be copied from the better one to the worse, improving it. How much Linux might take we won't know until we've seen the code. But I'm certain that Sun would benefit the most from access to those device drivers.
It is about time *ALL* *nixes were reunified into one humongous tree, out of which various branches (which will have a common base) will exist for various uses.
We use AIX (AIX Isn't uniX) at work, but Big Blue keeps making noises about replacing it with Linux.
Too many flavors.
He's quite right there, though.
(a) Businesses don't want more source code. Well, to be strictly accurate they don't want to have to manage, worry about, maintain, etc more source code than they have to. I think that given the choice, most intelligent CIOs would definitely say "sure, we'd love the source and rights to use it" - but would probably prefer not to have to actually do much with it, and face the burden of maintaining changes etc.
OSS alleviates this to some extent by permitting changes to be submitted back upstream, but this only works if you have the resources to engineer you changes "properly" and not break anything else (even stuff you don't use or care about).
(b) If you write for RH9 or RHEL3, your app will not run on a stable release of Debian. Not if it's a GUI app that uses any GNOME/KDE libs, needs a recent QT, etc. It can be made to run by either packaging it with a lot of extra libs (see Ximian's RH8 builds of Evolution for an example of this approach), spending a lot more time to make it handle varying versions of libraries, or forcing the user to update their distro or libraries themselves. None of these are attractive.
I see this as a real issue, but not a distro one. It's actually more about _versions_ - the rapid change of OSS, including APIs etc for major libraries and toolkits, is the root of the issue. OTOH, the same thing keeps "ugly" decisions from hanging around, and permits much more rapid advancement.
I'd like to see a cleaner way of running multiple versions of things in parallel (within the package management systems), as a work-around for this issue.
(c) Also quite correct. Many open source apps do not follow established standards, and often the file formats, protocols, etc are defined largely or entirely by the source code of the app. While these protocols/formats are definitely open, they're not open standards and there's usually not much chance that other apps will work with them.
It's true that you do have more chance of enchancing other apps to work with the formats/protocols, time and money permitting, or enhancing the OSS apps to work with the protocls/formats of your choice. It's also true to say that many apps don't support standard protocols or formats because there is no standard in that application domain, or it's crap. These things do not change the truth of his statement.
I can't see Solaris OS being majorly profitable for Sun either - they sell hardware too and if an open-source Solaris led to more end-user interest in their hardware it's easy to see it leading to an increase in revenue for Sun.
Essentially, Apple's strategy. And not really surprising, since Sun essentially does what Apple does--sell proprietary hardware with a tailored OS.
Question is: has that strategy paid off for Apple? And Sun has more to lose: they have a strong position in the server room, that Apple never had, so Sun would be trying Apple's consumer level strategy out but with their own Enterprise products--results may vary.
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$tar -xvf
As opposed to the original AT&T UNIX license which thankfully prevented companies like Sun, HP, IBM, SCO, SGI, DEC, BSDi, etc. from forking...
Remember, they aren't pulling in huge $$$$ for licenses for their OS, the way Microsoft is. Sun sells hardware. They have been known to give away their OS at zero/low cost in the past - it's their hardware that makes them the money.
Linux is good, it is very good. But it is not as good as Solaris in a lot of situations - Solaris has been in high end trenches and mission critical situations for a lot longer than Linux. An open sourcing of Solaris under GPL means several things:
a) Linux can benefit from Solaris
b) Solaris can benefit from Linux
c) Extensive code review of Solaris by the world probably won't hurt efforts to further improve security.
TREMENDOUS positive PR for Sun from an often ambilivant open source community, and a rush to make sure all important open source software runs flawlessly on Solaris (harder to test now since fewer people use it)
Problems to be delt with:
a) Making sure they have the legal rights to open source everything (of course)
b) Export restrictions? Not sure how this plays out for Solaris - since Linux is out there already I can't imagine the use of restricting Solaris (which is probably also out there, just not legally) but the government is known for a lack of common sense in such cases.
c) Fear of management that giving up ultimate control of all versions of Solaris will somehow be harmful.
Issue a) was one of the major problems when considering opensourcing BeOS - don't know how Solaris stands on such an issue.
But I think on the whole it's silly for Sun to try and compete with Linux head to head with a commercial OS - what's the point? Sun sells hardware and complete solutions, and generally does very well. If they can say "well, Solaris is GPL just like Linux, incorporates features X,Y, and Z that users generally cite as reasons they want Linux, and is proven and stable to boot" they get to just support Solaris again, and not have to worry about figuring out Linux. If that makes Solaris more widespread, what harm does that do Sun? It's not like Microsoft is going to pick up Solaris and incorporate it. Infighting among Unix like systems I think is fairly pointless in this day and age. Linux has made high priced commercial Unix licenses non-viable. So for companies like Sun, who sell hardware and solutions anyway, why not go with the flow on this one?
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
You say: I expect more of such problems could be solved when those companies specialized in enterprise bringing back good stuffs to Linux, and GPL. Isn't that exactly what Sun would do if they GPLed Solaris? Bring good enterprise stuff to the open source space?
Another thing Schwartz doesn't get: the possibility of forking is precisely what makes "Open source" open. The CIO does not want open source code because he wants his internal IT team to make a fork. He wants open source code because he wants the assurance that if Sun drops the ball technically or goes out of business (both possibilities) IBM or Red Hat or some mythical "Solaris Support Inc.) could pick up the Solaris ball and keep running with it. As long as it is proprietary to Sun, it gets bought by whoever buys Sun and it may be in their best interest to kill it. Mitchell Baker said it best: Open Source is about the freedom to choose leadership. Solaris users should be able to follow Sun's variant of Solaris as long as Sun continues to innovate and lead. But they should be able to follow someone else's variant if Sun starts to falter. This is all true for Java as well of course.
I definitely agree that Sun probably has people on both sides of the issue internally. For example, they provided the source code for Solaris 8 and the Java libraries but not Solaris 9. Also, the Solaris 8 source had some curious omissions, which are probably the parts that have licensing issues (OpenGL, SCO-cruft, etc.).
So, what would be very likely, based on prior behavior, would be for Sun to possibly release _most_ of Solaris under GPL minus the parts their lawyers are still unsure of. This would still be a big win for developers, who can benefit from debugging at nearly all levels. I've already benefited from having the Java source, GPL or no, and fully understand what those developers in the 1980's must have felt like.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Hey if you don't want to release the source you can (and probably should) do a static build, and not dynamic, so the end user doesn't have to have ur specific version of the libs installed, unless it has a fairly stable API, and is common on most distrobutions
Come to think, GPL of Solaris would allow Sun to build their own Linux and include the good bits of Solaris in it; maybe that's their plan.
Come to think, GPL of Solaris would allow Sun to build their own Solaris and include the good bits of Linux in it; maybe that's their plan.
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