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Solaris 10 to be Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "It looks as though Sun is going to open source their new Solaris 10 operating system. It seems to include eveything except some device drivers. They plan to model the Darwin and Fedora projects. Sounds very interesting."
Can anyone explain why someone might choose to use Solaris over Linux other than for legacy reasons?
If it's truly an open source license, this is only good news--Linux and/or the BSDs will be able to use the best bits. If it's just a "shared source" head-fake like Microsoft has tried to pull with some of their stuff, well, then Sun will solidify their position as Grand Moff Tarkin to Microsoft's Vader.
What does SUN do anymore? If they're open sourcing Solaris, obviously they're looking to get the community involved in developing it. They're also starting to ship some x86 servers (Opteron and Xeon), so are we eventually going to lose the Sparc processors as well? What does that leave Sun with? Java?
"It seems to include eveything except some device drivers."
So like linux it will work great if you could only find the drivers for your printer.
What is better is how can you Model Darwin and Fedora????
Darwin is the just the Basic OS, you can't run any OS X apps on it without Apple's software.
Fedora is pure Open Source, it just changes regularly, and has trademark restrictions on Red hat's images and such.
How are these the same??
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Unlike Linux, Solaris is a derivative of UNIX. I am sure SCO will be keenly looking forward to the day when Solaris is open source. ;-)
I wonder how they'll handle the Unix(TM) code in there and all the various other contributed stuff from Samsung etc.
I guess it's easier if they forget about CDE/X11 etc but it will be interesting to see what open source licence they use and how they handle 'other peoples' code in SOlaris 10.
Of course they could have removed all the Sys V R5.4 code, but without doing this unsing clean room conditions SCO could have a wondrful time in court.
Just wondering??????
If this is indeed true, I don't see any real need for linux anymore. If solaris is going to run all linux apps and it is going to have features like dtrace and a 128-bit file system and it runs on x86 AND it's free, I'm moving.
Open source is one thing, but I'm wondering how useful to us Sun's move really is if the code will not be put out under a GPL-like or BSD-like license
... lately I sense that "open-sourcing" is more an attempt of big companies to get some work done for free and get some PR at the same time, BUT with little real use to the community as GPL'ing the code would provide. Am I right?
at least for the x86 version it could solve one of the bigest problems: lack of device drivers. If they go OS in a proper manner many gpl drivers can be ported and they don't even have to pay developers to do this.
I don't read replies by ACs.
I'm waiting to see the license terms before I celebrate.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Just because it's "open source" (as opposed to "Open Source") as in "you can read the source" doesn't mean it's Free. And that may be all they do: let you read the source. If they don't use the GPL or BSD or some other well known FOSS license I doubt this will really help them all that much. If they come up with their own license (which a company as big as Sun is wont to do) it will probably be quite complicated and your average hacker won't understand it.
Last announcement about this was proven false by Sun's own CEO statments..
This will be the saem way with this announcement..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Just like Darwin, Sun will only open the parts that will ultimately benefit Sun. Just like Fedora, they hope to get a boost from loyal Solaris (RedHat desktop) users that have been using the "Solaris Free Binary License" (yes, I qualify here on both counts).
I hope this helps.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
If we're going to get pedantic, then it should be "GNU/SunOS," not "Solaris." To put it into Linux terms, Solaris is the distribution that's built on the SunOS kernel, just as Mandrake (for instance) is a distro that's built on the Linux kernel.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
And if you ever plan to write the Great American Novel, make sure you never read any books, magazines, websites, or other written work.
And if you ever plan to write music, never listen to any CDs or recorded music from any other musician.
Because you'll get "tainted".
--Joe
They run out of swap space, and they crash.
What ancient mummified version of SunOS did you work with? Just recently, I had a program go wacko and suck up every bit of virtual memory it could. My Sun workstation slowed down, of course, but I eventually got to an xterm to kill the offending process. No crash.
The book, Solaris Internals, details exactly what Solaris does when resources become scarce. It is designed to degrade gracefully by speeding up page scanning, for example, at certain thresholds of memory usage.
I think the crashing you saw was due to a specific program that you depended on (not Solaris) that was very poorly written.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
A wine glass has three distinguishable stable states (upright, upside down and on its side), and a plate only has two (upright and upside down).
It takes a lot more effort to get an upside down plate the right way up, than it does to get a wine glass on its side the right way up.
Does this mean it's much easier to get a titsup linux box up and working again than a titsup Solaris box?
They may be late, but they are bringing the hot blond that everyone stares at. She might just have a few makeover tips for the unibrowed linux kernel. :)
Douglas P. Price