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Sun Joins the Free Software Foundation
RLiegh writes "Ars Technica reports that Sun has joined the FSF Corporate Patron program. The article explains that the FSF corporate program allows companies to provide financial assistance to the FSF in return for license consulting services. The article goes on to observe that this move is doubtlessly motivated by Sun's interest in GPL3's direction. Now that Sun has opened up Java and become an FSF corporate sponsor...could the move to dual license OpenSolaris under the GPL3 be far behind?"
was to get rid of Mcnealy. I am betting that Sun will be back quite a bit stronger in about 2-3 years time. It sounds like the new CEO is not wanting to play games esp. with the OSS world.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If this is true, how come I can't ``apt-get install java'' and get the SUn Java on Debian default install?
Sun has contributed more free software than you or the rest of your complaining chorus will ever write in your lives. You don't have to like them, but Sun certainly doesn't have to listen to you.
Well, there're lot of companies who are "patrons" of FSF. Google, Intel, Nokia, Cisco, IBM. So I don't think they're trying to buy anything - but it doesn't means they're super-pro-FSF either (just look who are the other "patron" corporations). Sun has been using FSF products for a lot of time, it was already time for Sun to do this. Not that this is a bad thing, but it looks like people understood "Sun is becoming FSF's right hand", which is far from true.
I meant Learn != Copy :)
(No response needed or wanted.)
Sun were contributing to free software long before it became popular for pseudo-open-source enthusiasts to hate them, and even did so when they themselves weren't terribly sure how much they supported the concept. From OpenLook to OpenOffice, from Solaris to the recent Java announcement, I don't think there's much one can complain about in terms of their contributions to free software.
They're good people, the world is definitely better off for them, and the free software world especially.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I've experienced Solaris and its predecessors from the early 80's. Their kernels used to crash
You have experience with Solaris but don't realize that Solaris is based on a different code base than predecessors from the early 80's? Solaris is built upon SVR4 while SunOS 4.x and before were based on BSD.
The reason why Solaris was the OS of the dot com era was because is was so reliable. At the Brokerage firms I've worked at you always see Linux crash or hang and Solaris just keeps on running. That's been my experience.
And remember Solaris was designed from the beginning to support SMP, threading, and soft real-time. Things that Linux only later had hacked on (and soft real-time is still not part of Linux).
Solaris 10 is so far ahead of Linux that it's not even worth comparing the two but if you must just look at these New features.
I've heard some very strong opinions on Linus wanting Linux to remain gplv2. Some even suggest replacing Linux with Solaris. What I'm wondering is the same companies that helped Linux become what it is today make the transition? Open source is rarely run on kindness and love for humanity. Linux has reached critical mass, and I don't think GPL'ing even a product as good as solaris will derail it.
Both Solaris and Linux would benefit immensely from sharing with each other. But whos ever heard of two competing products helping each other.
Well, if the license becomes GPL3 then the userland stuff WILL BE gnu utiltities. If anything you'll have the choice, or the two will be combined together like some sort of inbred half-cousin. It'll be exciting. =)
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