Slashdot Mirror
OpenSolaris Indiana Released
Lally Singh writes "The Linux-friendly OpenSolaris Indiana has been released! A new, modern package manager and all the goodies of Solaris: ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and Xen on a LiveCD that was designed for Linux users. 'Why use the OpenSolaris OS you ask? It's pretty simple, you'll find it full of unique features like the new Image Packaging System (IPS), ZFS as the default filesystem, DTrace enabled packages for extreme observability and performance tuning, and many many more. We think you'll be quite happy to came by to take a look!'"
Without all that free crap.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
ZFS doesnt offer me anything as im not managing servers
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Is there any reason to switch?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I assert that it's too little, too late. If Solaris had been freed in the early part of the century, it might have made some headway against Linux. As it is, it'll be stripped of anything useful and portable and will be as irrelevant as HP/UX or OpenVMS for all but locked-in legacy users.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Anyone here know what's so special about the Image Packaging System? I found the homepage, but it didn't really explain how it differed from traditional packaging methods. (More annoyingly, it didn't even explain that intriguing name!) A quick check of Wikipedia doesn't offer much help, either. Anyone know the scoop on this (new?) system?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I'd really like to see ZFS become the default filesystem on Linux distros. Especially Debian and Ubuntu Server.
If I'm not mistaken, the latest FreeBSD includes support for ZFS.
C'mon Linux, lets get this filesystem! If we don't like the license, maybe we can come up with a cleanroom implementation that offers similar features.
goodies of Solaris: ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and Xen on a LiveCD that was designed for Linux users
In short, a small subset of the functionality I get with Ubuntu, and much less hardware compatibility.
...a hat and bullwhip?
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
I hope the grammar in the OS is better than this article.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
With ZFS you can smash a hard drive and keep the system running:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CN6iDzesEs0
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
For someone who has been using OpenSolaris (SXCE) as a server platform for Apache, ZFS, etc for awhile now, I welcome an easy to upgrade and improved userspace Solaris. Will try this one out. Solaris has had a relatively poor userspace experience for someone used to Linux machines. The kernel is top-notch though.
I've played around with ZFS, it's very cool. I mean very very cool.
It's a crying shame the licensing issues keep it from being ported to Linux as part of the kernel
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Honestly, I get 398,000 hits via a google search for "solaris image packaging system".
You're just trying to get other people to do your work for you.
The darn thing never even boots successfully on most all of my machines - on the one machine where it does - the network card (wired) is not detected making it unusable. OpenSolaris seriously needs a bunch of smart driver developers contributing drivers and general x86 workarounds - just not suitable for x86 hardware as of today (unless the h/w happens to be Sun).
...this version completely lacks support for Daylight Saving Time.
Has nvidia gotten around to allowing OpenSolaris to distribute their driver, or do you still have to download and install it manually?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
We named the dog Indiana.
I'm installing it right now. It looks like a copy of Ubuntu. It has a LiveCD, standard GNOME desktop, and an online package manager (called pkg).
Don't take that as criticism. Cloning Ubuntu is probably the best design decision an OS team can make these days.
Personally, I don't care whether it's Solaris or Ubuntu or *BSD underneath it all, so long as it supports my hardware and runs my applications.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The first OS fully coded in Java!
Ransom Love killed it with hubris.
And Sun bought the right to open "Open Solaris" from a company that didn't own that right. Install this at your own risk.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
How is OpenSolaris connected to this Indiana thingy and what is the difference between Indiana and Nexenta?
My take is that Nexenta is compiling the GNU software tools and providing them in their repositories. Is Indiana doing this as well or are they just trying to mimic the package management system itself but providing no GNU software?
Anyone know?
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
therefore, it is *not* Linux-friendly
The dtrace link points to an article on ZFS...
Stanislaw Lem would be proud.
Given what's happening to SCO lately, how valid is the license that Sun purchased to allow them to release the source code to Solaris?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Hmm, something isn't clicking here. Is not OpenSolaris Sun's "Project Copy Linux"? Doesn't that in turn imply "NOT Linux Friendly"? Can anyone argue that OpenSolaris is here to bolster Linux adoption? It's meant to be a direct competitor and uses a license that isn't compatible with the GPL.
"Linux-friendly" would also imply that the Linux development community has a say in the direction of the project. OpenSolaris doesn't have much of a non-Sun developer* community - almost all contributions are Sun employees. The "Sponsor" program clearly and fundamentally indicates that the community is not in control.
My point is that much of it may be open sourced, but that doesn't automatically mean it's "Linux friendly."
[* User community yes, but every operating system that survives past beta has a user community.]
that would be kombucha, a strange brew that's also good for you.
from a BSD point of view. If good open source software makes into their distribution, good for them and all their users. Goal accomplished.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
So who wrote that summary?
Richard Simmons, or the Oxy Clean guy?
new tag: toomanyexclamations.
seriously, it's a real turn off.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Thanks SCOSource. Without Unixware 7.x, this release would not have been possible. The previous releases based on Sys V were really crappy.
is that ZFS, despite all its goodness, lacks some incredibly basic features compared to 99% of the hardware and software RAID and LVM systems out there. You can't grow (please pay attention here) a ZFS pool except by adding similarly-redundant vdevs, and there is no way to remove a vdev from a pool, unlike LVM2.
So. Got a 4-drive RAID-Z2 array, and you want to add more space by buying another drive to add in to your 5-bay hot-swap cage? You're shit outta luck. If you have a zpool with a vdev that consists of a pair of mirrored drives, you CAN add another vdev of two drives, then another, etc. You also CAN replace the drives in a vdev with larger drives. That's kind of half-okay, but still not on par with RAID cards of a DECADE ago. Even Linux's MD can grow RAID5/6 across more devices!
Someone suggested the ability to grow redundant pools by single devices, and the reaction amongst solaris ZFS developers (!!!) was "now why would you want to do that?", and then when THAT was explained, "well shucks, I wonder how they do that" (they = almost every hardware and software RAID solution on the planet.)
Absolutely astounding that a Solaris filesystem developer would not be able to at least guess as to how a RAID5 array would be re-striped to add a new drive.
Far as I know, they've been working on the grow capability for more than a year and we have yet to see it.
Please help metamoderate.
No this is Debian.
My home servers are in screaming need of ZFS (A NetApp Filer for home use). I want ZFS implemented in Linux, like everyone else. Moving to a OpenSolaris based distribution just feels awkward and wrong, especially when ZFS has made it into FreeBSD 7.0 as an experimental feature.
I'm eyeballing the FreeNAS project daily. Sooner or later we will have a ZFS appliance, free as in beer at least. Sun have to work harder to win me over but things look promising. (Ubuntu on Sun hardware [+], trying to release Java under an Open Source license [+], closing some MySQL features [-])
Girls are strange. They don't come with a man page.
-- Michael Mattsson
While ZFS is cool, it will someday be ported to Linux (the market forces are such). The advantages over ext3 etc. are simply not compelling enough for me to abandon an entire universe of software and hardware I have gotten used to with Linux distributions.
I see no use for Dtrace as I use nothing more fancy than Matlab for analyzing my data. No fancy number crunching or developing here. I used to do a lot of heavy duty Fortran 95 programming, but that is history (which will not be repeated).
So, Sun wants me to trial an OS that is about 5 years late, and has major hardware problems while offering no compelling reasons for the switch. Sorry, but Microsoft beat Sun by a year or so. Its called Vista.
I used to be a Solaris user (on Sun hardware) - used it for about 5-6 years. The image of pricey hardware that worked at half the speed of commonly available Intel/AMD hardware running Linux has sort of stayed with me.
Ha!
/usr/ucb/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/debian/bin
That's great. I don't know I'd ever bother with this - it would have lit my mind on fire around 2001 or so!
I bet it gets a lot farther than the Debian-on-BSD-kernel efforts. Still, aside from trading away great device support in exchange to get ZFS, I can't see the point.
You could always do something like that!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Heck, in my experience, FreeBSD has better device support than OpenSolaris, and it comes with FreeBSD. It's really the best compromise, if you want that file system.
(/sarcasm) We think you'll be quite happy to came by to take a look!' Unfortunately, I couldn't find the part that allows me to build a sun4m compatible image. Of course, documentation would go a long way for some of that "nonexistent" hardware.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I think it all boils down to: what will come first, zfs like features under linux or device support under kindaopensolaris?
Open Source Java DAO Generator
sudo apt-get install x-window-manager-openwin mailtool
Lol!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
http://xkcd.com/37/
Is there a version of this for sparc? Anyone have a link?
OpenSolaris is a development project and a production-quality (supposedly), commercially supported operating system. Indiana was the code name for the first release of the OS.
Unless of course, you expect to use it in production. Even freebsd zfs developers say it is not ready on freebsd yet.
I think it's cute how rabid Linux worshipers are so quick to rewrite history about how Linux predates everything and had features from 0.1 that nobody else dreamed of at the time!
Crap. gnome?! WTF is wrong with people?
GNOME is also the default for most mainstream linux distributions that Sun would want to position OpenSolaris against. RHEL, SuSE, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora.
You should be able to compile KDE, or you can get a precompiled package on blastwave.org.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
The OpenSolaris OS replaces many of the traditional Solaris tools with GNU equivalents. It also has a new packaging system, which isn't especially like apt.
Indiana was just the code name for what is officially OpenSolaris 2008.05.
All of the projects I mentioned maintain repositories of GNU and non-GNU software.
things not looking so good after reading the transcripts of the Novell/SCO trial, Novell wasn't properly involved nor paid in SCO's granting to Sun the ability to open source System V technology in OpenSolaris. Uh oh, what SCO lied about Linux might be 100% dead on with OpenSolaris, stolen Unix IP!!!
Is it just me, but it seems that stories related to Sun, at least the ones that aren't bashing it in some way, always seem to come late in the day. Even when the submission was a lot earlier than that.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Novell taking on SCO is one thing, Novell taking on Sun is quite another. Sun is a much bigger company than Novell and a lot more money. It's not worth the fight.
It seems like SCO stiffed Novell by not giving them their cut of the licenses, but that doesn't mean the licenses they gave were invalid. If that was the case, the issue would have come up already.
Novell gets some good publicity in their fight against SCO, but in reality, they're not much of a player in anything. SuSE isn't that popular, at some point their revenues for their legacy products will dry up, and then what's left? There revenue has been declining for years and their profits have been iffy. All they're going to get out of the SCO trial is some pats on the back since SCO doesn't have any more money.
While there's no arguing that what SCO did was messed up, I don't really see Novell in a good light either. Novell purchased the rights to Unix for $300mil. The transaction between Novell and SCO was for about $120-150Mill. So SCO paid about half of what Novell paid and only gets 5% in licensing fees and no patent or copyrights according to Novell.
This just doesn't seem right to me. Either Novell seriously screwed over SCO and they were too stupid to know it, or something else is going on. Ray Noorda, who was CEO of Novell, left to start Caldera. Noorda is undeniably the reason Novell was who they were. From what I could gather they did have a good relationship.
Bottom line, I don't understand how Novell can claim they pretty much just sold a 5% commission deal for 50% of what they paid and act like their shit doesn't stink either.
According the wikipedia Up to his death, Noorda owned the Canopy Group. One of its holdings, Caldera Systems, purchased the Unix assets in 1995 from the Santa Cruz Operation, which had acquired them from Novell. In 1996 it also acquired the Digital Research assets from Novell and immediately brought a lawsuit against Microsoft that largely duplicated the claims that the FTC and Department of Justice had pursued in the early 1990s. The lawsuit was ultimately settled in 2000 with a $275 million payment to Caldera. Every time one of Norda's companies purchases something that used to belong to Novell, they sue. Usually Microsoft (Noorda hated MS).
Sorry but it just seems fishy to me. How would Novell not expect that SCO/Caldera would ultimately sue. Maybe Novell was aware of a possible lawsuit to attack RedHat while they were making moves with SuSE?
Open Source Java DAO Generator
How is ZFS performance in BSD?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Fedora, RHEL, SUSE, etc. don't have a default. SUSE, and Fedora have been advertising KDE 4 pretty heavily.
Ubuntu is the only one on your list that defaults to Gnome.
And even with Ubuntu's soaring popularity, many Ubuntu users are switching to KDE, and surveys consistently show the majority of Linux users use KDE.
Sun may prefer Gnome, but you shouldn't generalize that every major distro defaults to it, because that just isn't true.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I haven't run any formal tests, but it only seems a tiny bit slower than vinum.
I did find it odd that this story made it on to the front page so late in the day considering the official release was in the morning. But then again, this is Slashdot where it's fun to hate Sun. :-P
Nothing against KDE, just my rationale for why I think Sun went with Gnome.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
How easy is it to UPDATE applications and, more importantly, the operating system with the latest patches?
This is a big deal.
Every time I've looked into OpenSolaris before, it wanted me to subscribe to a pay service to get system updates.
I consider that to be pretty basic functionality (even Microsoft doesn't charge for their update service), so this was an automatic no-go.
Admittedly I may be way off-base since I am much more familiar with Linux and FreeBSD than with Solaris.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Read the transcripts. Novell sent Sun a letter before they open sourced Solaris to warn them that their license from SCO was invalid. Now they're asking the court to rule that this is the case, and Judge Kimball has given every indication that he's willing to do so.
I imagine that the folks at Sun have been pretty nervous since last August. Imagine, paying millions of dollars to put your product in exactly the position you've been (erroneously) proclaiming your competition is in. Not smart.
It's not Debian. Debian has had the ability to fully encrypt the root partition during installation since Sarge I think. Etch for sure. Ubuntu can do it too with the alternate installer. OpenSuse and Slackware have excellent docs on how to get / file encryption. Disk Encryption is essential for laptops and removable media in 2008. If Solaris wants to get adopted by government and financial sectors for use on laptops it will need to have some form of serious disk encryption. To be fair to the OpenSolaris people there are two teams working on encryption solutions but I think they lag well behind Linux or even Windows (Truecrypt) solutions. Two in development projects: Crypto in the lofi(7D) driver (a bit like dm-crypt on Linux or FileVault on MacOS X): http://opensolaris.org/os/project/loficc/ due to integrate soon. and ZFS Crypto which is still in development but due to integrate this summer. http://opensolaris.org/os/project/zfs-crypto/ However neither of these provide for an encrypted root filesystem as they aren't full disk encryption solutions. However with ZFS Crypto all of your home directory and other datasets (filesystems) with sensitive data can be encrypted. I for one welcome my Sun Microsystems overlords...actually I am glad to see another alternative to Windows becoming more accessible to the masses. I have my copy in bittorrent now ready to install in my [Sun Microsystems] Virtualbox 1.6.0 Congratulations to the Project Indiana Team!
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains..."
Can you be more specific because and include any links because I don't plan on reading all the transcripts. It is also contrary to what Novell has openly said before, which makes it kind of a dickish move in my book.
I do know that SYSVR4 was jointly developed by Sun and AT&T before Novell bought any rights to it and that Sun had certain rights even before purchasing anything from Novell.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Because the APA was secret until extracted in the SCO V Novell trial, there was no way for Sun to know SCO didn't have the rights. That wasn't settled by the court until last August.
Sun could know, though that they were creeps that it was dangerous to do business with them. That much was clear by the way they were running aruond suing or threatening to sue everyone who had ever done business with them.
Sun is not blameless in this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There are some mirrors for opensolaris, listed here: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/resources/getit/
It may be faster to download from one of the mirrors than sun directly.
For your convenience I list the mirrors here aswell:
http : http://dlc.sun.com/osol/opensolaris/latest.iso
ftp : ftp://ftp.df.lth.se/pub/opensolaris/current/os200805.iso
bittorent :
http://dlc.sun.com/torrents/info/os200805.iso.torrent
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/indiana/os200805.iso
Also, how can Novell claim they're owed money from the Sun agreement and claim that SCO didn't have authority to execute that agreement at the same time? That doesn't make any sense.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
The big plus of Nexenta for me is that it is based on APT, whereas OpenSolaris (the distro) has invented yet another new package system (IPS). APT just works so well on Debian and Ubuntu that I don't want to use anything else, and for end users there are nice tools like Synaptic and Ubuntu's Add/Remove tool (which shows popularity ratings for packages as well). At least PCLinuxOS adopted APT while still using RPM as the package format...
My only real interest in Solaris is to use ZFS on a home NAS - having all that checksumming looks a lot more attractive now that disk sizes are getting so huge that, according to some, RAID 5 will stop being useful in 2009, due to the scenario of one disk failing and another one having an unrecoverable read error (URE) during the rebuild - see http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162. Without proactive scanning of the disk media for read errors before any failure, and checksumming that can hopefully correct some such errors, RAID 5 rebuilds after failed disks will increasingly fail due to UREs. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/linux-nas-raid.html as well for a much more technical view of the issues with RAID 5.
Why an enterprise-grade Linux server installer should default to runlevel 5 is a mystery to me, but that department where I work is 100% Red Hat, so I just work around it.
Have a look at btrfs. It's getting there, and has quite a few exciting features and is well integrated with the linux kernel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs
...IPS were better than apt?
It's designed by (deb)Ian Murdock, with 15 years of hindsight.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
....greatly enjoyed the hearty and vicious debate between Linux fan boys and Sun fan boys. But of course since Open Solaris doesn't run San Andreas, I'll probably be sticking with Windows x64 a little while longer. :)
Though I do enjoy mucking around on my other systems.....
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
SuSE isn't that popular? In your personal little universe maybe. As far as I can see they are top three on distrowatch, above Fedora IOW, with the latest release 6 months old or so. And they have lots and lots of users, even though you don't hear much from them. German parliament being one of those.
You should be able to compile KDE, or you can get a precompiled package on blastwave.org. If you are interested in KDE on opensolaris then use BeleniX, the distro that offers this combination.
Oh, and dude: "its". You only use "it's" as a contraction for "it is". This isn't rocket science. And it's so easy to learn, too. Just read the Slashdot front page and do the opposite of whatever they do.
apt-get is not perfect. In fact, you may call "a hack." I don't think there's any real "theory" behind it. apt-get may even remove a user's kernel package, as one of the 600 traces in this study reveals:
OPIUM: Optimal Package Install/Uninstall Manager
http://pho.ucsd.edu/rjhala/papers/opium.html
Also worth reading are:
Search heuristics and optimisations to solve package
installability problems by constraint programming
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/report_ingi2800_C.pdf[pdf]
Maintaining large software distributions:
new challenges from the FOSS era
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/bibrefs/EDOS-FRCSS06.html
where they mention "Theorem 1 (Package installability is an NP-complete problem). Checking whether a single package
P can be installed, given a repository R, is NP-complete." (result is to be published elsewhere, though).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
OpenSolaris: What Ubuntu wants to be when it grows up
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Thank you Mr. Wizard. Didn't you have a show on Nickelodeon back in the 80s or something?
Can't slip anything past this crowd...I was referring to the feature of being free and open, not common Unix features.
SCO is required by contract with Novell to inform them for approval prior to such deals. Really, you need to plug into some authoritative news sources. There is plenty of "Unix" which Sun does not own, which they had to license, and the means by which that was done was in violation of contract. That includes many things in OpenSolaris. Get your butt over to Groklaw and start reading transcripts instead of popular blogs and cheesey rag popular computer news sites.
Oh, I get it--I misread the parent post...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I downloaded OpenSolaris 2008.05, tested and installed it:
:) (Hell, I'm posting this using OpenSolaris! ;) )
:)
The LiveCD booted up very quickly, with a 64-bit x86 kernel on my Pentium Dual Core processor. Clicking on the driver info icon revealed that OpenSolaris recognized apparently all of my hardware correctly, including my USB MIDI interface. (printer was turned off, no scanner attached, so I don't know about them). One point of criticism about the LiveCD is that it doesn't initialize the network (network chip is recognized tho).
Next, I tried to install OpenSolaris on a free space on my second hard drive. The installer has a graphical user interface, and appears to be user-friendly. The driver selector panel is at first a bit weird to use, but its concept is easy enough to understand. After installation, however, I couldn't get Solaris to run, because I had the NeoGrub bootloader on the first hard disk (running GRUB4DOS), and I couldn't get it to mount the Solaris partition to boot from it. It also appears that the installer didn't install GRUB anywhere on the second drive (not in MBR, not at beginning of partition).
Then, I shrank my Windows Vista partition (which has to be on the first drive anyway), removed NeoGrub, and installed Solaris in the free space. That worked; BCD area is still intact. The Windows boot manager can be selected from the GRUB menu. I yet have to try to incorporate my Ubuntu and FreeBSD drives into the GRUB configuration.
After booting from hard disk using GRUB, Solaris comes up and boots into GDM. After logging in, I'm on the GNOME desktop. Testing the screen savers revealed that I have accelerated 3D (on an i915 compatible chipset; actually it's an i945). Compiz also seems to be installed somewhere, there's a Compiz configuration tool in GNOME. I didn't manage to use the cube, or anything, so I guess it has to be enabled first. Everything seems to work so far, I'm quite pleased with it!
The only thing so far that doesn't work is an external USB drive that had been EFI formatted by Windows Vista. Disk sync errors are printed on the main console during boot. I haven't tried to mount the NTFS partition yet.
I'm curious about Solaris' stability. I've tried it 2 times already (Solaris 10 x86, two different releases, don't remember which), and the second time GNOME decayed to the point it was unusable, but that was GNOME 2.6.8. On OpenSolaris 2008.05, GNOME 2.20.1 is included. Let's see how well it works over time. Really, thanks guys, for making this release!
The reason why SuSE lost customers, is because they didn't test their packages. I cancelled my subscription after SuSE Linux 10.1, which had so many problems that I considered it worthless to use it any longer. SuSE does have some nice features, but they're useful only if they work. Also, I expect all packages in the repository to actually function, not crash when I run them. It makes no sense to include a package if it doesn't run. Other than to advertise "we have x packages in our distro". That's why I don't use SuSE anymore.
If they can be a Xen guest out-of-the-box, that makes it pretty easy to try out. More importantly, that makes OpenSolaris' lack of drivers (relative to Linux) unimportant. OpenSolaris wouldn't need any real drivers at all; just conform to some Xen software spec. ;-)
I can sort of imagine someone setting up a system where an OpenSolaris guest with ZFS serves all the files, and Linux does everything else. But Linux's filesystems and LVM are nothing to sneeze at, so one would really have to be excited about ZFS.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I actually read the transcripts now.
It still doesn't make sense. An example I used previously was that if you walk into a store, buy a product and pay the cashier, but the cashier pockets the money instead of putting it in the register, you can't expect someone to take what you bought away from you. The issue the store owner has is with the employee not you.
Someone countered that with the analogy, you walk into a store, the cashier sells you the register, which he is not authorized to sell and then pockets the money. Well, the store owner can't claim the money and get the register back.
By arguing that SCO owes them the money because the transaction should have been covered by the APA, they're asserting the transaction was valid under the APA.
Novell's argument seems pretty weak. If you could backup your claims with direct quotes or line numbers and links to the appropriate day of testimony I'd be interested in seeing it.
Sun along with IBM bought out their Unix licenses a long time ago. Sun paid close to $90million for that. Since 1994 they have been developing Solaris mostly in house.
In addition, the original SYSVR4 was developed jointly by Sun and AT&T. Parts of BSD were also included in SYSVR4. And as you probably know, Sun and Bill Joy (a founder of Sun) had a lot to do with the writing of BSD. So I think it's safe to assume that Sun probably wrote more of than Novell.
AT&T and Sun transferred the Unix code to Unix Laboratories to license, so that other companies could benefit from their open standards. Eventually Novell bought Unix Labs for around $300mil so they could try and save NetWare which was dieing now that Windows had some server capabilities. That never really worked out for them. Then they sold SCO the licensing rights for $120-150mil in stock.
Imagine Linus moves all the rights for the Linux Kernel to some separate entity, then years later that entity gets bought and sold a few times. Then that company sues Linus for using the kernel.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
You don't think Ubuntu is more usable than Solaris? You haven't tried Solaris then.
This was pretty interesting as well. http://www.google.com/trends?q=redhat%2C+suse%2C+ubuntu
Now, I'm not knocking Linux as a desktop but I think it is fair to say that the real value of Linux, at least where money is changing hands today, is on the server. And the number of server installs greatly outnumber the desktop installs. RedHat has always dominated server linux installs. I wish Netcraft kept freely publishing statistics like this as they are very interesting. When companies are talking about deploying Linux, they generally mean RedHat. At least here in the US.
And even if I'm wrong about SuSE's popularity, Novell hasn't monetized it the way RedHat has. Compare the two companie's quarterly reports to verify.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Suse is KDE and obv. CentOS is the same as Red Hat lol.
But you make a good point Sun doesn't get enough credit for the code that they contribute to they whole stack above the kernel.
I'll wait for ZFS port to Ubuntu 10.04
IANAL, but you can indeed expect to have the goods taken back from you. They do not belong to you, they are stolen property (stolen from the store owner by the cashier). The goods still belong to the store owner because they have not transferred ownership to anyone else and nobody bar the owner (and the courts) gets to transfer ownership. That probably doesn't happen much with store-bought items, but it happens all the time with cars. If you buy a stolen car it can be taken back by its owner, leaving you out of pocket. You then have to recover your money from the person who "sold" you the stolen car.
As an extreme example, if I sold you the Statue of Liberty (which I don't own) do you think you'd get to keep it?
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Open Source Java DAO Generator