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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..
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.
Everything under the Sun must go!
Because java doesn't insert itself magically into the apt repository the second Sun relicenses it. This takes work.
These things take time.
Compounding the problem is that Debian is also notoriously slow to update packages. You might have better luck with apt-get Pascal or apt-get COBOL.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Because they're not done yet. Supposedly, that'll happen soon. When that happens I imagine Debian will be among the first to distribute the GPL source derived binaries. What they have thus far is the hotspot jvm and javac. There's a few parts left, before it's really useful without the closed source tools. You're of course welcome to be skecptical until they make good on that deadline.
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Open Source Sysadmin
It's not open-source yet. These things take time, be patient. I think they said they'll finish the process by the middle of 2007.
"all their profitable software remains proprietary."
So what you're saying is they make money off the software they charge you for, and they don't make money off the free software.
Shocking!
I just felt a tremendous disturbance in the Force. It was if millions of slashbots cried out in pain as their heads asploded.
With apologies to the late Sir Alec.
Stick Men
My understanding is that JSE6 is not GPL'd because they did not want to delay its release. This means that the old licensing concerns with distributing Java on GPL'd platforms are still a concern. Though much if not most of the JVM has already been "open source," they were not GPL'd. JSE7 will be GPL'd if all goes according to plan, however, and Sun is now aiming to go straight to the GPL3. Here is JSE6's current license.
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.
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.
(No response needed or wanted.)
what would be an equally interesting question is when apt will be ported to solaris?
when that happens, i'm migrating.
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
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.
You obviously don't understand Debian.
It usually takes years for Debian stable to see the latest and greatest of today. This is why most normal people use unstable and people wanting a server use stable. Testing is right out.
If that still confuses you, then please switch to Ubuntu.
I have nothing to say.
OMG! You're right!
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Because the package name is sun-java6-jdk (and others in sun-java6-*), and it's in non-free (or multiverse on Ubuntu).
Java 7 will be released under GPL3, so expect to see that in main.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Here.
Debian derivative. Uses Solaris as it's kernel.
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!
Because you didn't do it. We were all expecting you to fix it, and only now you tell us that you were waiting for someone else!?
Bastard!
May we live long and die out
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. =)
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Or perhaps it was motivated by Sun's desire to buy their way into the "free" software community's good graces without fully embracing its approach.
What the HELL are you talking about?? After Java was open sourced Stallman said: "I think that Sun with this contribution has contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. And it shows leadership -- it's an example I hope others will follow.". What more do you want?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
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.