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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."

8 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.

    1. Re:This is how it should be done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "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."

      No, they care about Sun. pkgsrc, the NetBSD package management system, also runs on Solaris. This has nothing at all to do with NetBSD, and more to do with Sun getting pkgsrc to be even better supported for their OS.

  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.
    1. Re:More than just hardware by Homology · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      Really? It's of course nice of Sun to do so, but it's not like it's costing Sun $2,995.00 for each copy of software they make and sell themselves. But fear not, the bean counters know how to account for it so the total donation cost Sun just about nothing.

  4. Sun on the right track by bsdbigot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is a smart move, on Sun's behalf. Considering the impending release of OpenSolaris, it's important for them to foster more community involvement. What really makes me curious is the choice of NetBSD. Theo DeRaadt (OpenBSD) is (correct me if I'm wrong) a big Sun hardware nut. Nobody that knows better (and holds no other prejudice towards Theo) would accuse him of being a poor coder. I guess maybe Sun thinks that already going to be an OpenSolaris contributor? Or maybe there's been some past heated discussions between he and Sun?

    I think FreeBSD may not have been the choice for two reasons: 1) they have relatively new support for Sparcs; 2) they have a more Commercial Appearance than Open or Net.

    For you few that think that Sun is going out of business, you should read Yahoo finance once in a while; Sun is apparently quietly positioning themselves to go private (despite McNealy's flimsy denial); this means that, essentially, they have the cash reserves to buy back a significant portion of the outstanding stock. Of course, this all may fall to the ground, but they had a 6% jump on the rumor, which indicates a number of people thought this plausable. The firm that is supposedly helping them do this made major news when they helped Seagate? do the same thing a while back.

    Sun has quietly been rebuilding themselves for a while - the acquisition of Cobalt to put them back into the PC architecture; the purchase and subsequent open-sourcing of their grid platform; the purchase and subsequent open-sourcing of OpenOffice; the purchase of NetBeans IDE and the integration of same with the previously-named Forte compiler suite. The forth-coming OpenSolaris. OK, I disagree with the Java-branded Gnome desktop (KDE would have been my preference), but it still beats the hell out of CDE or OpenLook.

    I definitely feel something brewing at Sun, something really good. I've even bet money on it by purchasing a block of SUNW. I believe they are going to try to go where Apple hasn't and where MS doesn't want them - straight to the homes of millions.

    --
    main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,- 1,-100};for(I=l=0;l<10+0;put
    1. Re:Sun on the right track by SunFan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There's certainly a lot brewing at Sun, and a lot of it is subtle. However, piecing things together, along with hints dropped by McNealy and Schwartz here and there, indicates a whale about to emerge from what seems to be a quiet sea over at Sun.

      From what I gather, this is the minimum I am expecting in the next several years (I am _not_ an insider--this is just speculation based on public information):

      - a complete open source platform, from the OpenSolaris kernel (buildable with GCC) up through Java continuing up through all of JES, including an SQL database. All this backed by Sun, as a big axe to the head of .NET, primarily, but also as a value added alternative to Linux (although JES runs on Linux, too).

      - Subscription-based SunRay desktops delivered to peoples' homes. These would be hosted in a secure Solaris 10 Container, managed within their Grid environment, and delivered over their new SunRay software that can go over broadband. The environment would be GNOME, StarOffice, Mozilla, Evolution, GIMP 2, etc. (all the stuff bundled in JDS). Peripheral support would be through USB, so local printers, etc. should be possible. They would have zero-administration with a 1-800 number to call for support. Buying a computer would finally be like buying a telephone.

      - I would expect their Galaxy servers are aiming to crush the benchmarks (anything less would be disappointing, IMO). The leaked specs from a month or so ago put the 8-socket system with 8 or so PCI Express slots. If they are all independent busses, that would make for a 16-core Opteron system in 4U that can push something like 40GB/sec to NICs, direct attached storage, etc. If that wouldn't make for a scary database server, I don't know what would.

      - Once all the announced features are shipped for Solaris 10 (ZFS, Janus, e.g.), Sun will probably be the only vendor in the world that can allow sysadmins to really use today's rediculous CPUs in a reliable manner (containers, self healing, ZFS checksums, etc.). If Sun's numbers are right, a single Solaris 10 server could replace several Linux or Windows servers, dividing server rooms by non-trivial factors. It'll be a while before the lightbulb appears above sysadmins' heads everywhere, but the potential savings are too good to ignore. Given that Solaris 10 is free right-to-use, no one else comes close.

      - Renting time on the Sun Compute Grid could be huge, once people realize that the cost could easily be put into simple expense reports. In government contracting, it would be a matter of submitting the costs through the appropriate project charge number. This would bypass the rediculous hardware procurement process, which is awful. Of course, for classified work, something else is needed, but imagine a geographically distributed standards development team developing a reference implementation without needing to buy a new server or new storage for the project or having to bother sysadmins with it.

      --
      -- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
    2. 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