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OpenSolaris One Year On

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-a-difference-a-year-can-make dept.

daria42 writes "In June of last year, Sun Microsystems open sourced its flagship operating system Solaris. This article asks the question, where is the OpenSolaris project after one year of operation? It contains views from Sun itself as well as insights from an external contributor to the code." From the article: "Sun is yet to release some aspects of Solaris as open source software, although that process is due for completion by the year's end. Meanwhile, non-Sun programmers have to date offered some 165 code contributions to the OpenSolaris project, said Eagleton. Of those, 70 have been accepted into the project's code base, while another 95 are still in the review process. To allay early community concerns that the process of getting external code contributions accepted was taking too long, Sun has a temporary buddy system whereby external contributors are partnered with Sun employees."

4 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is all good news by KiloByte · · Score: 4, Informative

    Uhm, "everything"? And BSD? And MIT? And X11? And LGPL? And a vast majority of free licenses in existence?

    Among pieces of software that have significant use, are free according to the DFSG, and are not GPL compatible, I can name just openssl, old apache, core parts of TeX, and that's about it. (Before you correct me, read again the first clause of the previous sentence).

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  2. Re:This is all good news by twiddlingbits · · Score: 4, Informative

    Lets see..things Solaris could add to Linux:
    1. Containers
    2. Zones
    3. Awesome fast TCP/IP Stack
    4. Dtrace
    5. ZFS

    Those five alone would be the bump Linux needed to morph into a really solid Enterprise class O/S that is open source.

  3. Re:Wishlist: more pkg-get and flexible install by allenw · · Score: 3, Informative
    if usr is not mounted,
    Don't make /usr a separate partition. Seriously. You gain nothing by doing it anymore.

    the libs would have to be available somewhere in /

    They already are. Most of the vital libraries in /usr/lib are softlinks back into /lib.

  4. OpenSolaris better run than Darwin by GrumpyOldMan · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sun and Apple both ship a proprietary OS based around an "open source" core. Sun's core is OpenSolaris, and Apple's is Darwin. Sun has done a far better job open sourcing their operating system. I do a 3rd party hardware device driver for both MacOSX and OpenSolaris. To compare Apple's to Solaris' "open source" OS
    is quite interesting:

    - Source code: Darwin: Must sign up for an Apple account to view source, source code for Intel kernel not even available. Solaris: Source code browseable on web, and available to anybody.
    - Installable OS: Darwin was never updated from 8.0.1, which was released over a year ago. Solaris: Solaris Express is released at least monthly.
    - Project direction: Darwin code appears after a MacOSX release. There is no way to see the source code of an upcoming MacOSX version, there is no way to even know what features will be present aside for signing up for a $500/yr ADC account. You are not allowed to talk about this in public. This is in stark contrast to OpenSolaris, where Sun engineers publically debate virtues of different features, and future directions on their forums/mailing lists, and anybody is welcome to contribute.

    In short, OpenSolaris is a real open source project. Darwin is a sham, and would not survive without Apple.