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Sun Opens OpenSolaris.Org
An anonymous reader writes "Sun has launched the first version of opensolaris.org, featuring a small initial drop of source code. The idea is to make a display of good faith to the Solaris community while the rest of the source code due diligence is completed. The source code for Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is available for download under the terms of the newly OSI-approved CDDL license."
Part of this release is the opening of more than 1,600 patents to the open source community.
:)
link
IBM just got outdone on their 500 patent release. Let's see them come back with 5,000! Come on, it can be a Sun/IBM "who can give away the most patents to open source" war
Finkployd
How is opening their OS codebase, one of the crown jewels of the company, half-hearted? They are trying to remove as many barriers to Solaris adoption as they can. Costs to much? Free downloads have been available for years now. So "Free As In Beer" has been handled. Can't view the source code? Here comes OpenSolaris, under an OSI approved license. The license is not the GPL to be sure..but neither are the BSD licenses, the Mozilla license and the Apache license...you gonna bitch about them?
On a personal level, I agree. On an investor level, your comment scares me a bit. Sun still makes up for a decent percentage of my tech portfolio. I would like to understand what Sun is hoping to achieve through this investment.
They are continuing to face declining market shares. They could have used the money to build better hardware and marketing campaigns. They could have also provided enhancements to the existing Linux infrastructure to be better compatible with their hardware.
Still, the geek in me is happy with Sun and I guess that's a start.
--Discount Cartridges
Is the new license from sun gpl compatable?
If not then doesn't that mean that sun are
deliberetely trying to sobotache GNU/Linux from
the inside out by having people peruse the solaris code and then later cry foul when similar code or features creep into GNU/Linux ?
Perhaps I'm just paranoid.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
Linux is a real OS and BSD's end up having to use a Linux "Emulator" to run half the software anyways (not that I'm bashing BSD, I love Freebsd, hehe). So does that make FreeBSD or OSX (for using OSS software) crappy? No.
I just hope Solaris doesn't end up being competition to opensouce, Linux or BSD's (Some recent articles are claiming so) but instead just provides to the community like using either Linux or Freebsd, both providing the same tools to use and all of them having their uses.
If Solaris is based on SCO's System 5 code, then wouldn't opening it's source (whether Sun has the right or not) potentially pollute other open source projects that borrowed from it?
If Solaris is based on BSD and has no SCO code in it, I guess that's not an issue. But then why did they take out a SCO license? I imagine some conspiracy theorists will say simply to hurt Linux, but that can't be the whole story, can it?
IBM had a SCO license too, but that's because AIX has SysV code in it. That's not the code they gave to Linux, but if they were to open-source all of AIX and pieces of SCO code migrated to Linux, that would be a problem, no?. So why not with Solaris too?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Basicly, I think of it as the Ultimate Packet Sniffer command line tool, being applied to processes and your system as a whole, along with a scripting language for your pleasure.
It lets you track/compare/analyze users and processes in real-time to basicly tell you what your computer is really doing and lets you pinpoint who/why it is doing it, system wide, without configuration changes or restarts..
Look forward to a lot of REALLY powerful scripts coming from this(there is an experimental rootkit coming out even, that used dtrace to sniff out passwords in system memory, etc). Very powerful, very dangerous.
I presume (though I don't really know) that Solaris needs to be built with Sun's C compiler. Is this compiler coming forth as an open source release too? If not, is it going to be freely available? If I remember correctly, you currently need to pay in order to get Sun's cc.
If it is coming, this is great news. A compiler highly optimized for Sparc may benefit all operating systems that run on it. Who knows, maybe their x86 compiler has some good features too. Sun's libc (probably highly optimized for Sparc) would be a nice thing to have. Anything else?
And OpenSolaris is the anti-Linux. OpenSolaris is a professional open source operating system centrally controlled and run by a corporation, rather than anti-capitlists and anarchists who's only goal is chaos and hacking.
For those reasons, Sun has released OpenSolaris. It is a direct effort to take the best open source developers off of disorganized projects like Linux and onto a more corporate-friendly project that will in time become the de-facto operating system for all Unix deployments.
Note that only projects under the CDDL are allowed to use these patents. Linux developers MUST REALIZE that they are NOT covered by this IP release. Sun has just fired a warning shot across the bow of Linux, and will almost certainly take legal action against Linux developers in the near future as more and more OpenSolaris code makes it way into the "wild". Anyone thinking of implementing DTRace in Linux (or anything REMOELY like it) should realize that they will most likely be the target of a lawsuit by any number of companies including Sun. Additionally, if it can be proven that they visited opensolaris.org, they will be liable for triple damages.
Linux doesn't have a buggy awk, sed or tar.
Solaris 8 does.
Most x86 hardware doesn't suffer from the transient error bug that the non-ECC cache of the ultrasparcII processor.
Linux works on parking meters.
Solaris doesn't work out of the box with an A1000.
Most quality nics work out of the box with linux.
Most netras and ultras have to either be hardset or vice versa, and won't work the other way.
Don't get me wrong, I like sun hardware (Love LOM), but it and it's software are not perfect.
Sun's been using the term "Open" in their stuff forever. Remember, Sun's X environment was called "OpenWindows", and even though they've since discontinued the old OpenWindows window manager, their X server still resides in "/usr/openwin".
Though Sun's definition of "Open" has traditionally been "open standards", as opposed to the F/OSS definition which I believe to be "open implementations".