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NetBSD Announces Sun Hardware Donation

Posted by timothy on from the heart-cockles-warmed dept.

Jeremy C. Reed writes "NetBSD announced that Sun donated two machines running Solaris '[i]n order to support and further the development efforts of the NetBSD Packages team, to promote the build of binary packages for Solaris 8, Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 and to enhance the support of the Sun Forte Compiler chain.' The NetBSD Package Collection can be used on many platforms beyond NetBSD to provide an easy way to consistently install third-party software and manage packages."

4 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Sun Blade 1000 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Contrary to their name these aren't blade server, but more or less "usual" desktop system towers, just with the Sun-style. Nice nevertheless.

  2. This is how it should be done by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 5, Informative
    I've seen some comments by people involved with NetBSD, complaining about lack of hardware or developer support for some lesser-used platforms/machines (and as you will know, NetBSD runs on some exotic hardware).

    This example shows how things should work when supporting any specific hardware/software combination. If you want something done, donate some time by making contributions, fixes, testing, helping out developers with information about the hardware, etc. Or donate money or hardware. Or help developers by giving access to the hardware (remote shell, test their fixes etc., whatever helps).

    If nobody cares about support for a particular software/hardware combination, then what is lost? Software support for hardware that nobody uses anymore. Anything remotely popular will do just fine.

    Apparantly Sun cares enough to throw some hardware at the NetBSD project. Good for them, and why not? Anyway, it's nice to see the NetBSD project helped out like this.

  3. More than just hardware by SunFan · · Score: 3, Informative


    From the announcement: "Sun also provided licenses for SunOne Studio 9"

    That's plural, and each Studio 9 license retails for $2,995.00.

    If there were several licenses, for example, this means the donation could be "worth" up to $10K or more. Sun Studio also comes with good documentation, a good debugger, run-time profiling and memory usage checking, etc. NetBSD could even use this for improving NetBSD itself, depending on their dev tool policies (Studio is not open source).

    --
    -- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
  4. Re:Sun on the right track by hubertf · · Score: 2, Informative

    FYI, the machines donated by Sun to NetBSD are for _pkgsrc_ development, not NetBSD development. And as such, the machines will run Solaris, not NetBSD. pkgsrc (formerly known as the NetBSD Packages System) is a system for easy installation of 3rd party software from source, and it runs on may systems, including NetBSD and Solaris. See www.NetBSD.org/Documentation/pkgsrc/ or www.pkgsrc.org for more data.

    - Hubert