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NYT Ponders the Future of Solaris In a Linux/Windows World
JerkBoB links to a story at the New York Times about the
future prospects of Sun's Solaris, excerpting: "Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?"
This is the famous GPL "workaround": single author for the code, then he can provide the code with any license... even proprietary: mysql, openoffice, LZO(where the proprietary version is explicitly way better than the open source one...). Of course you cannot contribute to this software without *sharing*(my a...) your rights with Sun. Basically, it ends up like a BSD license, but with one single author in control. If that author is trustable on the long term, ok... but there we are talking about the board of the "little microsoft...". Careful, or the open source community will get burnt. Solaris must die, or let the GPL workaround go and build a Linux spirit like community: basically to insure that the open source version will stay the best, and not a proprietary fork (cf Darwin/MacOS and the BSD license).