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Taking a Look at Nexenta's Blend of Solaris and Ubuntu
Ahmed Kamal writes "What happens when you take a solid system such as Ubuntu Hardy, unplug its Linux kernel, and plug in a replacement OpenSolaris kernel? Then you marry Debian's apt-get to Solaris' zfs file-system? What you get is Nexenta Core Platform OS. Let's take Nexenta for a quick spin, installing and configuring this young but promising system."
These are the types of stories I miss on /. No, politics, no civil procedure/court news, no DRM wars. Just plain old news for nerds (even if it doesn't matter all that much).
It's not possible to compile Opensolaris without downloading and using a whole bunch of binary components which are distributed under a proprietary license. (see here for details.
This is in stark contrast to OpenBSD (and to a lesser degree NetBSD and/or FreeBSD -both of which include proprietary binary-only blobs). Their license is OSI approved, but you can't compile a working system using only the parts that are open source.
And this is after three and a half years, guys.
We need to prevent another monoculture in the information sector, even in open source. If everyone uses the same kernel, they will all have the same vulnerabilities. Safety in numbers means having more than one popular kernel.
I guarantee RH is the most popular in the enterprise, which is how they want it. RH gave up fighting for the Linux desktop, which they see as irrelevant and unprofitable.
So, to answer you question (mark, really), RH has only been "relegated to near irrelevance" on the desktop, and that happened only because they didn't want it.
Put identity in the browser.
"Solaris" is a reference to the Sun (and by extension, to Sun Microsystems) in Latin. "Ubuntu" is Zulu for humanity.
An elegant blend would be "Ilanga" (Zulu for Sun) or "Humanitas" (Latin for Ubuntu).
Don't mind me. I just hate portmanteaux.