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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?"
Is Linux has a new and very adept competitor. Solaris has some GNU pains, but they won't last long, and underneath the hood is some amazing work.. It is just just ZFS, and DTRACE either, just take a look at the main page for ifconfig on Solaris vs other systems. There is a lot of depth to Solaris that will start coming out, esp on SMP systems, but on any system really.. The great thing is, Linux will have Solaris to learn from now..
Judging by the naming conventions that most companies who embrace Open Source use, I would sooner expect "Open Solaris" than "Free Solaris"
(see: Open Office, Open SuSe, et al.)
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Entitlement? Okay, sure. Yeah. I want Debian to do me the "huge freaking favor" of downloading the jdk and keeping track of what's in the file system.
How long does that take? I know it'd take me about five minutes (and it *shouldn't* take more for any reasonable package management system)...what is that amortized over all the users of Debian? I'm sure it comes to less than a second each. I think you may be exaggerating how much of a favor it would be for a Debian user - though I am not one.
This has nothing to do with what I want. I don't care one way or the other what Debian does.
If I did I'd probably be involved in it.
Well...that's not quite true. Because I know that I have to either use unstable packages or deal with not getting stable stuff until way later, I have decided not to have anything to do with Debian. Otherwise I might be using it now. If Debian was the only choice, of course, I'd use it and be thankful for it.
But it's not, is it?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Honestly, even if Sun puts Solaris under the GPL (2 OR 3), it's not automatically going to be a serious contender to Linux.
I've worked on the Solaris O.S.. I've worked on Linux (totally the latter these past 8 years). I've put code into GPL'd projects and have worked on projects that require not only GPL licensing but that you transfer the copyright to the FSF. Here's my view.
One of the single biggest reasons why Linux is so popular among kernel developers is that they get to keep their own copyrights. It doesn't have to be transferred to the FSF, Sun, or anyone else. This is also the single biggest reason why no one is interested in doing work for the FSF's Hurd. There's a real distinctive pleasure in saying that you own the copyright to a certain piece of code. Forcing someone to transfer that is like ripping something away.
I work for my own pleasure. I don't work for the FSF, nor Sun, and I'll be d*mned if they end up owning my own code without paying me first.
My bet is that Sun is going to absolutely botch this effort, and force people to transfer all copyrights to either Sun (like they do now) or to the FSF (as RMS has wanted for years).
If they do that, Solaris will never catch up to Linux in popularity. There will always be more developers for Linux than Solaris, just like there is now.
Which, frankly, is a real pity. Linus has screwed up in a number of critical ways, and although Linux has come far, Solaris is still better in many aspects (if not most). I'll spare you my biggest nits, which cause me solid grief; ones I wouldn't have if I went with Solaris.
The bottom line though, is if Sun doesn't insist on the copyright, I'll drop Linux immediately. And I'll work my hardest to promote Solaris (especially if they are GPLv3). But if Sun and the FSF think they can use my talent and then take my code away, they can go piss off.
I really, REALLY hope Sun makes the right decision here. But from past experience, I would be surprised if they did.
[captcha: "creating". How appropriate]
Remember how happy everyone is about IBM's contributions even though all their profitable software remains proprietary.
People are happy with IBM's contributions because IBM actually makes contributions. That is, they contribute stuff to existing open source projects without demanding control over those projects.
Sun isn't doing that; both Solaris and Java are going to be dual licensed and controlled by Sun. That means that while the code happens to be released under a nominally open source license, the projects are not run as open source projects, and the exchange of code doesn't work for them as it would be in an open source project.
On balance, it's still good for Solaris and Java to be released under an open source license, but there are good reasons to be a whole lot happier with IBM than with Sun.
What I love is you avoid even commenting on the below because you know Solaris is more reliable and a better engineered kernel than Linux.
Because even if it were true, it wouldn't matter.
Not hard to believe when Sun spent 500 million on Solaris 10
Yeah, too much; it's basically an Edsel.
and have the best kernel developers in the world working on it
And what evidence is there for that, other than unfounded claims about Solaris quality? Your reasoning is circular.
AS A REAL JOB not part time hackers.
Most Linux development is done by people who do it as their job.
The reason why Solaris was the OS of the dot com era was because is was so reliable.
Don't try to rewrite history. I was there, and I was one of the people who picked Solaris for dot com companies. People picked it because they knew it, and they knew it because 5-10 years earlier they were using it at university. And they were using it at university because it was cheap. Other than that, it was merely "reliable enough". If reliability had been the primary consideration, people would have picked AIX or Irix, both of which were generally believed to be superior to Solaris (a lot of their technologies and code have made it into Linux, incidentally).
And that's why people pick Linux: it's widely used, its development is open, and it gets the job done; that's all that matters.
And remember Solaris was designed from the beginning to support SMP, threading, and soft real-time.
Bullshit. Solaris wasn't designed at all, it evolved out of SVR3, BSD, and SunOS, and each of those all evolved from the original V7 UNIX. Trying to portray Solaris as the herculean design and implementation effort of some elite group of kernel hackers at Sun simply has no basis in reality.
If you really think Linux is so great maybe you could give some examples of what makes Linux better than Solaris or Mac OS X?
It's "great" in the same sense that a Ford Escort is a better car compared to a Ford Edsel.