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Sun Joins the Free Software Foundation

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the putting-themselves-out-there dept.

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?"

9 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. What this means by pooh666 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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..

    1. Re:What this means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "The great thing is, Linux will have Solaris to learn from now.."

      Nope. Solaris is going GPLv3, so can't be dragged back to GPLv2, which is where Linux is expected to stay for now.

    2. Re:What this means by diegocgteleline.es · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There's a lot of things to learn for Solaris too (not just drivers). So both can learn things. All this can only be a good thing - the two most powerful operative systems of the world are GPL (just because Linux is going to keep GPL2 doesn't means anything) and both should be able to exchange code. Linux and solaris should be friends, the enemy here are non-GPL operative systems.

    3. Re:What this means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Ok, I can see why someone might of thought this is flamebait. Here's some proof.

      http://docs-pdf.sun.com/817-0574/817-0574.pdf

      Then, check this patch out:

      http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetke y=urn:cds:docid:1-21-118833-36-1

      Then, check out which problems this patch solves, but obsoletes older patches that didn't solve the problem all the way. Next, check out which problems this patch fixes for other patches applied. Finally, check out which problems this patch causes (Note 74) !!!!!

      Now tell me you'd rather use this shitfest then something like debian or RH.

    4. Re:What this means by aeoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think this is indeed amazing. It blows my mind that perhaps Linux will stop being "it" for many people for whom it currently "is it" or "that's where it's at". To think that Solaris, from the point of view of software freedom, not only overcome FreeBSD, but also even Linux, it's pretty mind blowing to me.

      What's next? Windows Vista GPL'ed? I doubt anyone cares about any technical achievements in Vista's kernel, but on a social plane, such an event would be very interesting.

    5. Re:What this means by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Linux and solaris should be friends, the enemy here are non-GPL operative systems.

      Oh, so BSD is an enemy, because it doesn't kowtow to Richard Stallman?

      You zealots make me purge.

      --
      "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
  2. Re:And this can mean only one thing by powerlord · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Free Solaris for everyone!


    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.)
    --
    This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
  3. Re:Sun opened up Java? by fireboy1919 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!
  4. Re:ugh Linux by oohshiny · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.