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Sun to release Solaris source code
According to this story on ZDNet, Sun has decided to release the Solaris Source code under their SCSL (Sun Community Source License). It seems Sun wants to copy the success story of Linux. What do you think about it?
Especially considering the recent developments in the Mitnick case. If I was more paranoid, I might think it was timed to be after...
this this news really big enough to deserve being posted 3 times?
I post links to stuff here
I thought I'd heard about this months ago, and I could *swear* it appeared on Slashdot then, too.
Regardless, this isn't really important to anybody. It still bears Sun's license, which prohibits developers from doing anything with the code and retaining their contribution. It all goes back into Sun's pockets. Their license is useful - it lets you look at the code of their products, which might be very handy in an educational environment - but for real world work, it's only a good license if you don't mind handing all your work back to Sun.
Question: would it be possible to look at how Sun's code does something (say, for example, SMP) and then use the *ideas*, not the code itself, to improve areas of Linux?
i think it's great! even if HeUnique posted it 3 times :)
now with BSD and Linux and SUN there'S choice
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http://www.beroute.tzo.com
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Okey, now we are going to see, whether the argument "Linux would die if Solaris was free" has any content. I know, this doesn't mean Solaris is free or GPLd, but how many people will jump ship.
My guess? Not a big number...
The SCSL still doesnot promote the growth ( or infestation as some would say) that the GPL does. Hell even a BSD license would be better than Sun's poor excuse for openness.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
My thought is the more 'open' any software becomes is a great advantage to everyone. Regardless of
who wins (linux or solaris) the point is that the
user community wins (read consumers).
The trouble is that a lot of people are going to mistake this for a real open source release. In some ways, it's the nightmare scenario that RMS has been trying to warn ESR of, though I don't think his methods for combating it are the most effective: most people out there still think "free software" means gratis, not libre.
So, how can we spread the word? How can we let people know:
This is a pretty complex message, and getting across even the simplest ones is difficult. How shall we tackle it?
--
Xenu loves you!
I just said that yesterday.. except the SCSL is a bit restrictive. (IMHO). Are they afraid that Linux is getting to much hype and are they grasping at air? It will be interesting to see the response of this, not only from the Linux community, but the UNIX community.
Only 'flamers' flame!
IF you view Sun's moves recently as all mainly attempts to hurt MS and place itself at the top, this makes just so much sense. Whether or not the SCSL has enough of the advantages of the GPL and BSD licenses to make it as useful, it's still something Sun's done that MS hasn't. Having to send your changes back to Sun doesn't mean you can't mod the source for your needs, which has got to be an advantage.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
that /. posted a 'what if' story about that yesterday, and today Sun does it.
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-- Out of cheese error! Redo from start.
Sure, so long as the code's only copyrighted...you can copyright `expressions'---specific ways of presenting ideas, but you can't copyright an idea.
Thus, if I wrote a book about a crazed whaling captain wanting to take vengeance on the beast who'd munched his leg, Herman Melville would have no kick so long as I told it my way, not copying his words or (I presume) too much of his organization.
If the code was patented, on the other hand, it's a whole 'nother kettle of cetacea...
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
This is great news but I find it hard to believe. They can't just be abandoning their opportunity to make money on Solaris. Big companies never really want to go opensource, they only care about the bottom line, not morals. Open source and linux are buzzwords, I am very suspicious of big companies supporting open source/linux. Example: Corel trying to avoid open source untill they were flooded with email from angry open source fans.
In my gcrystalball I forsee a story on slashdot in the near future of Sun in some way attempting to exploit the open source community.
(this is not flamebait aimed at Sun fans, just wariness of anything with an IPO going opensource)
Okay, immediately after reading this, I surely thought this was some sort of pop-up window as a joke. Wow, Sun must be psychic.
-Dave
What'll happen here is that any "nice" parts of Solaris (and I'm so angry with Solaris lately that I can't think of a one) will be assimilated into Linux and the other open source OS projects.
Reasoning: If you thought getting started with Mozilla was tough from a learning-curve point of view, just imagine how tough it would have been on a much larger scale (like this is). Besides, anyone out there interested in doing operating systems development is already likely working on Linux, and I can't see any compelling reason to switch over to working on Solaris. After all, linux's success was a right-place-at-right-time occurance as much as anything else.
Besides, Sun's instituting Yet Another License, which is always discouraging to those of us who think that the GPL is still the only really honest way to go in terms of open source licensing.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
SCSL simply doesn't inspire community support. SCSL only gives Sun the marketing advantages of Linux, not the real advantages. While this _may_ encourage some businesses to stick with Sun, I suspect this can only slow the domination of linux, not keep it from happening. Linux will continue to grow as free software, and solaris won't. This is just a marketing ploy to capture companies that are interested in 'that open source thing'.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
The situation reminds me a little bit to that of the American Civil War where the two opponents were stuck in a patt situation where nobody could gain a substantial advantage over each other. Until one side came up with the killer argument: Give freedom to the slaves!
IMHO Sun can't win against MS unless they rigorously GPL their code. Solaris as well as Java. They need to free their source code in order to get the position against MS that will convice the people.
I wonder how this will affect LINUX development. The source code to Solaris should help solve some of the scaling problems linux has. Not to out right rip the code, but it should help point the way to more scalable kernels.
Of course, what else is there in Solaris that it does better than LINUX?
I could be wrong on this, but it seems to me that maybe Scott is a bit scared. There have been a number of developments at Sun that look great on the surface, but several /. readers have questioned Sun's motivations behind the moves (the SO acquisition for one). One reader suggested that Sun is using Linux not because it's a pretty viable computing solution (which is rapidly getting better), but using it rather as a tool to help kill Microsoft. "Linux is a good starting point. When you're ready to graduate, here's Solaris" is the impression I get from Sun. Maybe this move indicates that they've realized the Linux juggernaut is a threat not only to Microsoft, but to Sun as well. One of the stated goals of the Linux community is "Total World Domination" and that idea probably covers the entire OS spectrum. We've made exceptional strides into the server market (and 2.4 should help alleviate some of the scalability issues holding Linux down), and with KDE 2.0 on the horizon (as well as the rapid changes in GNOME ;), the desktop shouldn't be too far off. I think maybe Sun is trying to hold on to *their* position here, but I have been called an idiot more than once...
screech
jason
Have a good day?! Impossible! I'm at work!
This a day after 'Would Linux survive if Solaris was free'.... That article seemed to be concentrating on free beer, but the response was mainly that free speech was more important, and now it seems to be happening.
But 'Copying Linux's success?' - surely this is more like copying BSD's success, because of the way the Sun Community license works.
Should we be worried? From the way hackers have reacted to other Sun Community releases, I doubt it - the open source community seemed, and continues to seem severely underwhelmed by Sun's have-hearted effort to go open-source. When they GPL stuff, then we should be worried - or conversely we needed be worried at all, because ultimately if the Open Source community can use stuff from Solaris and vice versa freely, everybody wins - that's the point of Open Source.
Surely being able to view the source code will make it much easier to develop exploits to break Solaris security? The guy that cracked the PCWeek SecureLinux box used the source of the photoad cgi script to develop an exploit. Access to the Solaris code will help too - especially in the short term. I'm sure Sun haven't done a line-by-line audit of the code.
It has been a while since I looked through the SCSL, but if I remember correctly, it doesn't allow derivative works. You can download the source code, look at it, say Gee-Whiz this is neat, you can even compile it for your own entertainment, but you won't be seeing Debian Solaris or RedHat Solaris. You can't re-distribute it.
Heck, Sun won't even accept bug fixes for Java from the developer community. You have to log your bug report at the Java Developer Site, hope people vote for it and that Sun actually fixes it.
It's a little more open (as in transparent) a process than Microsoft's I guess, but it is a far cry from genuine open source development!
Dana
Solaris surely represents a couple of billion dollars worth of intellectual property. Sun's preparedness to give this away at the click of a mouse makes you ask "what is the value of a technology company"?
To me, Sun are saying that source code is worthless without the ability to support that code, to evolve it and to use it to provide value to their customers.
So the value in buying Solaris is not in Solaris per-se, but in the people at Sun.
Or maybe I'm just up myself and they want to sell more hardware. It's important to know whether the x86 version will be available.
I use Solaris, Linux, and *BSD almost every day, and I can't say that this does anything to really change the way I feel about Solaris.
I tend to use Solaris in situations where I either have to have it for commercial applications, or places where I REALLY want Sparc hardware (which is very nice to work with in a server environment). And I use it because it works well and is rock solid.
However, with Linux, and to a lesser extent *BSD (NetBSD in my case), I don't just use it; I feel like I OWN it. It's mine and no one can a) take it away; b) Change it to where I can't stand to use it any more; or c) go out of business and leave my OS of choice unsupported. I'll never have that feeling with Solaris, since it isn't free; either in cost or in the way it's developed.
This sense of ownership has been the prime reason why I've used Linux as my primary desktop for over 4 years, even before there were any hints of good application software or decent emulators.
my 2 cents..
jf
With Linux having a little "stability" in the market today will this move by Sun really matter? Are the Linus' out there going to port this over to x86 or other architectures? I think not. The most I see happening with this is a small increase in the SUNW stock graph and maybe a few optimization tweaks for Linux or the other FreeNIX's, and possibly some new "Sun-derived" admin tools for these boxes.
Surely there most be some slashdotters out there who have some idea of what the source code is like. If the Slowaris source code is anything like Mozilla, I think we don't even need to guess the outcome of this release. Well, at least by having the code we'll all know for sure why it's called Slowaris.
It also seems to me that Sun is grasping at straws. I think they have data that the rest of us don't--that Linux is definitely stunting the growth of Slowaris.
There might be some perusal of the source, and maybe a bug fix or two, but it is not going to make any difference at all
Firstly, for them to gain any benefit from the release they have to have a whole support structure in place, they need a developer mailing lists, they need an open development cycle, open knowledge of what they plan, what needs to be fixed, and an idea of who will do what. Sun are not doing any of this, its purely a dump of the source, take it or leave it. What benefit is that to anyone, including sun themselves ?
Secondly, its not really all that open, the community licence twaddle is just "yet another licence", and at this stage for developers licence fatigue has set in. Why code something for solaris, when you can do the same work for linux, and use a licence which is understood. Sun are giving away with one hand, and due to this licence holding on tight with the other
Sure we all want open source, and this is better than nothing, having the source available makes life so much easier for developers to make their drivers work under solaris, advanced system programmers can read through it and see problems for their products, and so forth. But this type of source release basically benefits existing solaris users. There will be no grand influx of users to solaris coz of this, and there will be no flood of developers helping sun, my only fear is that this lack of interest will be pointed out with a "look, open source does not work"
C.
I sometimes write stuff
Just look at OpenBSD. It's open source, yet it's the most secure *nix OS on earth.
Another example is RSA encryption. The source code is available, but that doesn't help you crack the algorithms.
Of course, I haven't read the Sun license in detail, and what I read made my eyes cross. Am I wrong? Is it better than I suspect?
-- The unsig...
So this is kinda offtopic...but I wanna know how Solaris competes with Linux right now.
Looking to purchase a Toshiba Satelite 2595 (or something similar) in the next few months and it really grinds my eraser that the only options I seem to have when it comes to watching DVD movies on a laptop (don't laugh) is using Win98 or a Mac. Not even the wonderful Multimedia OS (Be) has it. So...remembering that Solaris is free for personal use...I trotted over to their webpage to see what they offer in terms of x86 notebook compatibility (ie drivers) and DVD Movie support. Didn't find much to help me.
Perhaps there isn't such a strong market desire for the DVD movie-on-a-computer under Linux. But Couldn't Corel or IBM or one of these big rich helpful companies buy the licenses and help things along...? I'd pay a bit of cash for a binary if it would let me watch The Matrix (barring other problems) on laptop in a bunk on a boat, without having to have WinClunk. (Which IMHO is not worth trashing a $2100 machine with. My old compaq play-machine that sits in front of me yes, but not such a long-term investment.)
"I want peace on earth and good will toward men." "We're the U.S. government. We don't do that sort of thing!!"
If you sign up for the SCSL stuff, please don't *ever* contribute to Linux. The SCSL is basically a non-competition clause, so the lawyers will easily skewer Linux if it is contributed to by someone who signed up for the SCSL. Not that they would win, but who can afford the legal fees?
You gotta wonder what Sun is up to with this. Maybe they need some help to get ready to compete
with Projet Monterey . Once this project is complete there will be few competitors for the "big iron" applications.
I didn't follow this one too closely, anyone know why Sun is not participating in Monterey?
K
In my opinion on of the truly incredible things about Linux is that you can make changes to the system and *if* you can convince others that the changes are good they get incorporated and acknowledged as being yours. Once incorporated you can always look at that piece of code and say "I did that, I own that." For me that is the greatest allure of Linux.
Now with the Sun Licence (as with Apple's) you can make changes, but you can never own the change or - probably - even get acknowledgement. And that is the biggest hinderence for Sun's experiment.
anyway....
J
Oh well, no point in steering now.
This is a typical Sun move. In the face of overwhelming odds, they pretend to make the right move. Let me elaborate:
... what really surprises me about Sun is that it seems that they just don't get what the open source movement is really about ...
Why it's too little: Their community source licence is not really open source. They still keep final control of the sources. Yes you can look at the source, but it's not really open source the way the GPL is. They are trying to ride the open source success, not more and not less. Given their history and their (BSD) roots, this is basically an insult to the intelligence of open source developers.
Why it's too late: A few years ago, a true open source release of Solaris would have won them over the hearts and minds of developers all over the world. But now? Who cares. Yes Solaris is still ahead of Linux in high end scalability, but I am quite certain that Linux will catch up with and overtake Sun even in the scalability game within a few short years. On the desktop Sun has long since lost any lead they might have had (check out the discussion about the OSOpinion article yesterday for some anecdotal evidence about this from other Slashdotters and myself) and the basic Solaris installation is rather pathetic when compared to a modern Linux distribution.
I'd much rather spend my time futher developing Linux where I'm ensured that the sources will remain public and accessible to everyone around the world, than fix Sun's bugs for them and not get jack squat in return
The North always had far superior manpower and a larger industrial base. McClellan could have marched to Richmond and destroyed the confederate capitol during the Peninsula Campaign if he hadn't been so completely psyched out by the southern commanders (who he outnumbered heavily, but was convinced that the opposite was true).
After that, the North cycled through one inept commander after another. Lee knew how to beat each one until Grant came along. Grant had a fairly simple approach to the whole affair; he set his "acceptible loss" numbers very very high and just pushed.
So, Grant actually managed to keep Lee busy. At about the same time, Sherman's army cut loose from their supply lines and gutted the South's infrastructure (Atlanta was the big railroad hub -- burning it like you saw in Gone With the Wind would have the same effect as nuking O'Hare, LAX and JFK all on the same day).
Not that the war didn't become about emancipation, I just didn't want you to think that was the deciding factor.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
What's special about Linux is that there is no "inside" or "outside" to the extent that Linux/Alan don't really match up to Sun as a faceless corporation. Time and again, they have shown that their primary interest with Linux is to make a great operating system and not to cut corners. This generosity sets an example to other programmers and encourages development.
Does Sun inspire the same feelings? Would you, as a developer, contribute code knowing that some giant company was going to make tons of money off of your efforts - and if you wanted to do the same, you'd have to pay them royalties?
Sure, people will look and learn from the Solaris code, but when they want to leave a lasting legacy, that'll be through contributing to GNU/Linux. With Solaris, you're still putting your eggs into one basket. What happens to the source code if Sun goes under? You'd have to destroy the internet itself to destroy GNU/Linux, which is available on countless servers.
Something we'll hopefully see is more than two architectures (sun4*/x86) supported. Solaris on an Alpha... mmmmm...
Bah.. /. needs to have submit be preview... accidentally hit enter and *poof* off it goes.
;^)
anyway, i've noticed that people have a habit of "picking on" source-release commercial packages. That is, people find bugs in the source and keep them to themselves (it is a commercial environment, after all--you must pay for anything). There are two major reasons the Free software (i don't side with RMS or ESR on this, both are extreme, both have good points.):
- Users feel an obligation to the community
- Users get an ego trip out of doing the most
The second one is probably more of a reason to fix things than the first, as it's more powerful.
In a commercial environment, users lack that incentive. The primary motivator is money, so it doesn't make sense to just "give away" something that benefits Sun. I think this explains the restrictive license.
But there is one group that will find this to be a boon: crackers. Having the source code to a package makes it easier to crack if you know what you're doing. For example, look at all the TCP/IP DoS attacks Linux has been through. But those were found and fixed by people within the Community. Why? probably for the ego boost and a sense of duty. Crackers don't like revealing their technique to begin with, but they have a Real Ego Problem. So the ego trip really helps get their secrets out into the open. The Sun model doesn't really provide for this ego trip.
What i'm getting at is this: expect to see Solaris get cracked a lot more Real Soon Now. Unless they bothered to do security Right the first time, which seems to be less than probable.
send flames, comments, thoughts, etc to spam@jbm.strlen.net, as this has made me think. i'll get back to you with my Real Address from there
(again, sorry for the double posts.)
I dunno about Sun. Sure it's nice to have the source, but is it really worthwile to even touch it if it has strings attached? Maybe they are
hoping some of the source will be incorporated into linux and then they can claim partial ownership to the kernel.
Don't mean to be paranoid but couldn't this
happen?
For those interested in conspiricy theory, here's another possible reason for Sun to make source viewable. Consider this...
Sun release the source, and almost definitly, many linux people being curious hackers, will look around, to see how things work. Then, one of them at a later date includes a patch for improvement in the kernel, which Sun attempt to claim is using copyrighted code from their source. It could be impossible to claim "clean room" situation, if they have looked at it, and even if it wasn't true, it would be a major hassle.
This is actually more likely than you think, as I'm sure Linux is still missing some features that Solaris has, so the possibility of a patch including that feature would be subject to closer investigation. Consider scalability, say a patch is included that makes Linux more scalable, and a lot of the kernel is rewritten to take accord of the new structure/spinlocks, whatever. Then Sun contest that the scalability is theirs, and the kernel has to backtrack. (even if they lost, the impact could be major)
It might sound scarey, but it would be well worth considering the worst case, before looking at Sun's source, especially if you may add something to linux at a later date. If this happened, it could seriously slow, or scupper Linux development, if you have to keep looking over your shoulder at Sun.
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
What is funny is that we've returned to the late 60's/early 70's. Back then the manufacturer GAVE you copies of their OS so it would ease THEIR maintenance problems. You had the code. If you could fix it...you did, then gave them the results to share with other users.
Linux (GPL/BSD) goes beyond this though with the viral nature and not locking things up in copyright, so you can use the code as a base for other work.
So I don't see the big deal in praising Sun for doing something IBM use to do 30 years ago.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
This is classic Sun strategy. Sun has always attempted to wow and amaze the audience into thinking that they should be/are top dog in the arena. The truth of the matter is that they are the Microsoft of the Unix world. By releasing their source code, they have taken one step towards beating MS, and at the same time are going to "wow and amaze" enough open sourcers to be slave labor for them. What good is their license if we can't do anything with the source code? If I'm going to work for Sun, then I expect a paycheck at the end of the month.. :)
"May the Code bless you and keep you until the day of your Compiling." ~Requiem
There's also a positive offshoot for Linux in that we are free to steal a lot of Solaris's cool features. I don't mean plagiarize the code (Not sure what the SCSL has to say about that), but this should speed the development of, among other things, XFS for Linux, which was announced several months ago but since I haven't heard any news on from either the Sun or Linux camp.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Sun's community source license has done nothing but get in the way of java on linux. i don't think it will do anything for solaris.
why are they releasing the code to solaris, anyway?
How can they feel the rain but not know of the flood?
I don't think so. This war was a major breakthorugh in modern warfare. These "incompetent generals" simply did not yet have a strategy ready about how to win this war. They lost so many people by trying to figure out new tactics anyway that they could not have won the war without the help of the freed slaves.
While we've known that Sun were going to do this for some time now, it's a pleasant surprise that they're making the entire codebase available. Until now, it was always going to be desktop Solaris that was community sourced, but they were planning on keeping the high end stuff (clustering, massive SMP, etc.) proprietary. Sure, the license sucks, but it's better than nothing. We can still take the best ideas (although not the code directly) and incorporate them into Linux, *BSD, etc.
Personally, I'd like to see DG/UX opensourced. It's probably the best Unix kernel available today, and I'm sure that EMC are going to drop DG/UX like a hot potato as soon as their contract lets them. They were only ever after CLARiiON anyway...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
So what if they don't use the GPL or a license as free as BSD. It's not like their going to stop commercially developing it. This is just an attempt by them to ensure that their stuff is more open. It's still a commercial OS and anyone who contributes to it knows what the terms are. The world doesn't need to be either 100% closed source or 100% open source. I think there is plenty of room for shades of gray. I for one applaud Sun's efforts. It's a lot more than any of the other commercial OS vendors are doing.
This is good news for the Linux Sparch developers who might want to see how Sun has solved some of the issues they are dealing with. For the for the rest of the us this is a big yawn, in the same league as Apple's Darwin. This will be another example of how Open Source falls down in the face of Free GPL'ed software. Or in other words, how software licenses aimed at preserving copyright don't stand a chance against licenses aiming at preserving copyleft. Long live SPARC, death to Solaris :-)
We could even explain it to NT people by comparing it to NT permissions of None, Change, Full Control, and Read, in that order. (For those unfamiliar, the main difference between change and full control is that the latter can change permissions/owners, the former can't)
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
They are obviously trying to get at Microsoft to become the premier software/hardware provider to the x86 market. If they want to release the source code under a non GPL license then fine. Embrace and extend will not work too well for them since there are three BSD incarnations and various platforms for Linux. Both of these enviromnents offer the dependability and reliability that Solaris has without a for-profit-only motive. I wonder if Sun has really thrown in the towel to the open-source movement or is just trying to circumvent some R&D expenses.
Before anyone gets too riled up and makes refences to Gates of Borg, try playing the theme music for the Empire from Star Wars. It's more appropriate.
As for Soloris, I don't care. I never use it anyway. I will stick to Linux and WINNT (gasp!-have to at work).
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
I guess you didn't read the article...
What worries me is the same response to the microsoft 'crack this box please' challenge: *why* should "our lot" of open-source developers work on something for Sun, for free?
We don't get anything out of it, really - we have our own OSs, we don't need to fix Sun's bugs for them!
Given this, it's a nonsense to hope "we'll trust solaris because we can see the source". We can just see the bugs in the thing some of us used to trust anyway...
Besides which, the restrictions on commercial use probably violate one or other open-source license...
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft makes of this. Sun's done stuff like this before, with Java and SPARC (I think), but I wasn't really expecting them to do this with Solaris. Microsoft could very well release their own source code. But what if MS didn't release *all* the source for NT? What if they just released the source for the Win32 subsystem? Or what if they released the source for their scrub OS Windows 98?
There's the possibility that Sun, by releasing Solaris, will make a lot of *Windows* developers happy.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
Wasn't solaris source code open to academic use already? If so, why does this change anything?
The operating system they sell is far from their primary business. The cost of a Solaris license is not even a drop in a bucket in comparison w/ the cost of an enterprise server.
Now, I'm not saying that Sun doesn't CARE about Solaris. They are just doing what they think they need to do so that more people will buy Sun hardware. I work with sparc machines. I can tell you this: it is very nice hardware in comparison with all the Intel/x86 compatible stuff you see. Expensive, though.
It will be interesting to see the solaris internals, I've heard all sorts of rumors about the quality of the code. I'm also curious about the implications of cross polination. With xBSD and Linux, there is some code sharing and the kernels are different but for the most part they perform very similar. I'm not trying to start a war here but BSD had the same problems that held linux back in the mindcraft study. To really see a difference you have to run a pretty extreme environment and even then I think a lot of Linux people are of the opinion that linux can be tuned to operate similarly to BSD. There really just isn't a lot for linux to take from BSD and drivers and hardware support are what BSD can take the most of from linux.
Solaris is a different beast, it is a known performer on the highend. I don't know if they use a single kernel for all solari or if a 64-way server kernel will be "open sourced" but SMP and multiprocessing have to be one of the key areas where BSD and linux could potentially benefit from Solaris. Now it is probably illegal, I haven't read the license but I know that we couldn't simply drop Sun code into Linux or BSD but they could potentially give us a road map to highend scalability. Who do they sue if we were to emulate their code?
I'm curious what will happen to the CDE/Motif portions of Solaris. Surely they'd have to be released in source form too, but I doubt the OSF will go for it...?
Anyone heard about this little thorn?
Okay, so the SCSL isn't nearly as open as a lot of us would like. But before you complain endlessly stop and think. Last year did you have access to the source for Solaris or StarOffice? Will you next year? This is a step forward right?
Just as ESR reluctantly congratulated Microsoft for their stance on instant messaging we should be praising SUN for taking these steps and encouraging other companies to do the same. If SUN saw the advantage to using the SCSL, maybe if we rationally and respectfully submit our case for going full open source they will see the logic of that soon. But if everyone criticizes SUN for being just another corporation that does not understand open source we are discouraging other companies from even going this far.
Can we really say that SUN has made things worse with this move?
Article on Slashdot about a day ago
LOL what a coincidence
And don't flame me, yes I realise that no company changes their business strategy this quickly based on a bad article, but they're so close together it's just funny! Kinda makes you wonder...
Patrick Barrett
Yebyen@adelphia.net
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Why? Because McNealy wants Microsoft's market share and has a good plan to get it. How? Please the geeks, and please the end-users.
On one hand, he's throwing out a pseudo-Open Source operating system-- what more could a geek want? It's a powerful, *real* Unix (not to say that Linux and BSD aren't, but c'mon, they weren't developed by a Big Benevolent Coporation (tm)). And, hey, Sun computers are pretty good machines, inasmuch as they whip the hell out of anything that you can put NT on. So he has good hardware and an operating system that geeks will fawn over, just like BSD, Linux, and MacOS X. So he has the geek market cornered.
On the other hand, he's pleasing end-users. How? By taking their cares away. Use an NC, and all the maintenance is done by a SysAdmin. Use an NC, and you don't have to worry about how *anything* works-- you just use it! All you have to do is play with the interface. So he has end users fat, dumb, happy, and using Sun products.
That leaves Sun on top. With the same market share that Microsoft has (which, in my mind, still doesn't constitute a monopoly). So McNealy is going to wind up with Microsoft's market share, partially by condemning Microsoft for *having* that market share!
Jeez...
i can imagine a PHB specifying non-open source solaris for some projects. will this make it easier to get linux in the door? will it alienate some segments of solaris users?
do i care?
I never read my licenses, i could care less what people think of the license. When i buy/download/use something i don't carry a lawyer with me to debug the license.
solaris is a superb operating system, i could care less if it kills linux, things are a fad, things will die, things will pass on.. nothing stays around forever..
but having the code, and having an OS freely available is great.. now whenever i run into a problem under solaris and i said "damn i wish i could have the source, this is a simple problem" i can now fix it..
so what if i don't get the claim to fame on my patch, screw all you hippies out there who have to have that.. i'm getting my job done, and thats what counts..
congrats sun, congrats apple.. both of you have great unix systems, and i applaud anyone opening up technology..
and i pitty the fool who cries over licensing all the time, when really its not anything to cry about.
Assuming a lot more people start looking at Solaris code, what will the impact be on Linux from a legal perspective?
It could really help Linux to have access to Sun drivers and perhaps also to glean ideas from other parts of the OS. Does anybody with a legal/intellectual property background know what the pitfalls are? Under what circumstances is it bad to have intimate knowledge of a competing product?
I'm pretty sure automotive engineers are allowed to fiddle with competitor's engines, but chip manufacturers seem to think you need to be "uncontaminated" by a competing product. Who's right and under what circumstances?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
SUN has and always will be a hardware company. Giving the source away to non-commercial interests won't affect them in the least. They'll still collect their OS fees from companies buying their hardware. Software does not significantly impact Sun's bottom line - even Java still loses money for Sun to this day. What scares them is a world without SPARC. They do not wish to be commoditized into the x86 wash. What does it mean for Linux? Absolutely Nothing.
XFS is being ported and given away by SGI, not Sun. I was at the Linux University thing in DC a couple of weeks ago and heard Kent Koeninger from SGI give a talk about XFS and CXFS. The main reason that XFS is taking so long is that SGI is creating a separate version of XFS to be GPL'ed, while keeping a proprietary version for IRIX. SGI, unlike Sun, is gaining major points with the Open Source community because they are GPL'ing everything they release.
-
"If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution."
I've read the SCSL in breif, and was quite pleased to see this step forward for Sun. Releasing Solaris code will help them to strengthen their operating system, and will allow individual users to effect bug-fixes for their own needs.
;-)
It will not create an Open Source effort out of Solaris, but that's OK. Closed-source is a business model that deserves to compete toe-to-toe with open source. Solaris is a very nice operating system in a lot of ways (though I have little respect for their suite of tools and utilities). It does do threading in a way that I think is genius. It handles multi-processor SPARC systems in ways that Linux and the *BSDs should aspire to.
Bravo Sun! One small step for Sun; one giant leap for Solaris.
If this works out, perhaps they will see the value of going completely GPL and sucking in code from the Linux kernel. Then the waters will get very muddy!
Will this help Sun?
Yes.
Will this, as the NEWS REPORTER said, be a boon like GNU/Linux for Sun. No.
Mozilla/Apple's Darwin are 2 example "riding the Linux wave" And they arn't 'riding that high'.
A possible reason why (that has nothing to do with the GPL...we can debate something else today) is The Human Desire to Create (and call it your own)
How do we see this?
NIHS - Not Invented Here Syndrome
The old BSD complaint that if you created code, you had to have it approved.
(I am going to ignore other creative efforts and stop the list at this point, for a list like this can go on and on)
With things like Darwin or Mozilla, no one in the 'community at large' is the creator, they can influence the work, but not be the 'author'. And, for many, being the 'author' is #1, they don't want to be a part..however small.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I was thinking the same thing. Not only that (licensing) but couldn't they close it up as well?
True enough, but I doubt the hardware is, either. Yes, the hardware division is almost certainly very profitable, but I'll pretty much guarantee that Sun makes most of their money from support and services, just as all the others do (IBM, Compaq, SGI, etc.).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Mozilla is one huge piece of application.
True, it is divided into smaller modules, but my impression is that the modules are still pretty big.
However, in a kernel some parts of the code is pretty small. Device drivers for example.
On the other hand, I'm not very positive about the SCSL, but it is much better than nothing at all.
Sun's are using a variety of tactics to try to hurt Microsoft. These include Java, the StarOffice aquisition and now releasing Solaris under their SCSL. Sun are unlikely to lure many Linux developers with the Solaris SCSL, but it may very well appeal strongly to existing Solaris developers. I would imagine that they are also trying to encourage Linux apps to be ported to Solaris. Sun's reaction to Linux seems a bit lukewarm. On one hand, it's in competition to Solaris, but on the other, Linux may encourage more people to use *nix, which will benefit Sun as a Unix hardware & software vendor.
I believe that Sun would be better off by genuinely supporting Linux, in the way that SGI and IBM are, and should offer customers a choice of Linux or Solaris on their hardware. I would much rather use Sun servers than NT ones (is NT Server an oxymoron?) as Sun are a damn sight more open than MS, though obviously not as open as some people would like.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
Actually, the Civil War was really the last classical war, albeit with modern weapons. If you look at tactics and troop usage, its little different from how the French or the English fought their wars in the 18th century. When you're using musket technology, you have to line up your troops in tight lines, because the guns weren't all that accurate. With the Civil War, you had the same lineups, but REALLY accurate weapons to fight one another with. American warfare changed a lot after the war, because we actually learned how to use our weapons correctly.
IANAL and the SCSL may actually have a way to prohibit this (reading it made my head swim and I almost lost consciousness), but consider...
There might be a way to contribute to the Solaris community, get your ego boost, and still screw Sun!
1. Find a serious bug or exploit in Solaris.
2. Develop a fix for the problem.
3. Announce the bug/exploit on the net, and post your fix as a patch (your original code only), but license the patch under the GPL.
The Solaris community gets to fix the problem, since you can mix GPL'd and proprietary code as long as you don't distribute them together. You get your ego boost because it's your code. And Sun is screwed because they can't rip off your code to fix their lame software.
Brak: "Somethiiing tooooooo think aboooouuut!"
That's right, Brak. Think about it today, kids!
Remember how a bunch of volunteer forum moderators sued AOL for labor-law violations? Sun wants to get rich off of institutionalized volunteer bug fixing with its SCSL program. Could a judge rule that Sun had to compensate those volunteers?
Oh please.. You already have Beowulf clusters with
Linux. (on Alphas, it can't be beat)
For high availability clusters, sorry, not much
can beat a VMS cluster. Tru64 is coming close tho.
mike (former sys mangler in VMS Development group, now at API)
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
There's no way that Sun can compete with the Linux phenomena. At least not if they use their own restrictive license. It would be far better if they released the source under the GPL. Or if they joined in and started to develop for Linux instead of working against it.
W S B
WSB
Sun are not expecting thousands of Linux developers to leaving linux and come across to developing for Solaris. But since the source code is visible it will be much easier to see why and how they happen in solaris. Fix linux so that it is more solaris compatable.
You as linux developer can get very upset about the license all you like. As a solaris user I am
happy I can now see the source.
Simple.
Sun could care less whether they are Open Software or Free Software or whatever. They sell computers, not operating systems. They could also care less if people contribute to solaris. This is not an open source project (the way I see it) it's just a service to customers. They release the source code so paying customers who bought machines from them have one more perk of running Solaris instead of AIX/HPUX/Tru64/Whatever. Sun are not idiots. They know that Linux has some big advantages because the source is available. There's a lot of people out there who are pushing for Linux because the source code is available, at the expense of Solaris. These people dont care if the source is open, free, whatever, it's there. Now for sun, it's there as well.
-Rich
Several months ago, having been a Java developer for some time and being interested in looking at the source code, I decided to download it from Sun ( under Sun Community Source License ).
I got a big surprise when I realized that the country where I live in, is not among authorized countries to receive source code.
I contacted Sun Legal department by mail, and they kindly explained me that the specific problem with my country was its weak copyright laws concerning software.
I'm not a lawyer (fortunately! ) but if an Anonymous Hacker takes some ideas (say SMP) from Solaris source and implements them in Linux, who can Sun sue? OK, they can go after RedHat, Debian et al if they include it, but if said Anonymous Hacker puts the patches in an easy to install package on an FTP server somewhere...
Sun can then prove to the OS community that they are venal lying bastards by suing any company who runs the said patch, but I think politically that would be shooting themselves in the foot. I think this move is a) to pressure Micro$lop, b) to try and get the OS community on-side whilst obliquely threatening Linux.
I would say the minute Sun try and be heavy handed over alleged violations of their SCSL, they will totally alienate the OS community and I don't think this is their intention.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
I use both Solaris and Linux on my box, and for different reasons - Solaris boots about 5x faster than Linux on my box, and X is a Heckofalot more stable on Solaris. However, it lacks compatibility with my printer, and I'm currently working on an ethernet driver. I think the SCSL is "good enough" for a person like me who just plays with other's source, and I don't mind Sun having my modifications. I just was hoping Sun would publicdomain the OpenWindows Deskset. After all, they do admit that it's obsolete! Linux Long and Prosper
I'd like to make some points:
*) Sun's SCSL license is not open source, nor trying to be.
*) Not all the source code will be made available straight away. Like with their other stuff released under the SCSL, you'll only have to pay Sun money if you plan to make a profit on it yourself. Sun also require you to fully publish the specs for any new APIs you add, and are very hard on compatability - ie they don't want it corrupted/code forked. btw, you will need Sun's compilers to compile it, and they haven't (yet) made the compilers SCSL.
*) I don't think this is really aimed at the general public (of coders) - it's mostly aimed at commercial compains who currently want to liscence Solaris to make their own products, and there are a few, and also at developers who already use Solaris.
*) I think the two main advantages they hope to gain from this is more developer interest, and better quality software - by getting better feedback. The reliability of Solaris is very important to Sun - there are managers whose salary and bonus are tied to it's reliability.
*) This is part of Sun's relatively new, general attitude towards development - first with Java last year, some of their microprocessor designs, some high end software (Sun Cluster Tools 3), Star Office, new software (Jini and Jiro) and now Solaris. I've heard it said that Sun plan to make all their software available under the community source unless there is a good reason not to.
*) Sun have very good reasons to worry about protecting their software - Microsoft would love to damage Sun, like it did Netscape.
*) The descision to go with their "community source" lisence would not be new. Sun have very long lead times on development for Solaris, and because Solaris contains quite a lot of other people's IP (which they'd have to get a new lisence for, or do their own version) as well as tidy up the source for public release, they would have to make the descision very early in the product cycle. Solaris 8 (which will be the first to have some source code freed) went into alpha about 1 year ago, and has probably been in code freeze for about 3-6 months, and it'll be released in about 4-6 months. And Sun aren't even adding that many new features with Solaris 8. Co-incidentally (probably not), when Solaris first went into alpha, was about the time I first head Sun execs talking about making Solaris open source.
*) Some people have said that Sun might be worried about Linux, or Project Montetery wiping them out or something. Currently, as with the past few years, Sun has been having very stable and reliable growth (20-25% per year) and I haven't seen the slightest indication that they're "hurting" from Linux (the opposite in fact) and Monterey isn't even finished yet, and even at best won't take off for another 2 years.
Btw, what's new in Solaris 8 you might ask? Well, they're putting in their cluster tools software as standard (currently a seperate product), doing IPv6, including perl (perl 5.0005_03 to be precise) as well as some modules to access parts of Solaris, some bits for Java, new diagnostics tools and such. btw, Sun will support everything that comes with Solaris for 5 years after they stop selling it.
I think the issue is not whether or not Linux or solaris 'wins' against the other, but if Sun does something dirty, upperhanded, and *shudder* Micro$oftish using the Sun Licence.
IANAL, but I think what we need to worry most about is if sun claims that distro's owe them money for having their proggies in the distro that were GPL to begin with or perhaps by some programmer that didn't have an idea what he was doing, licence wise, that got assimilated somehow into the SCSL, and then Sun could charge people who make distros for say, adding Drivers or patches to it.
-[ World domination - rains.net ]-
Sun isn't giving away the OS. They are just offering the Source under "yet another license."
For Everyone !
Who cares? On hardware less than $500,000 linux is better than Solaris. It has more device driver support, it has much better virtual memory management, it is easier to install, port to, and use.
To quote a freind upon hearing the news. "Good maybe Solaris will improve."
I don't think Sun did this to compete with MS. I think they are scared of Linux. And they have reason to be. Sun will get pushed to the high end market and be competeing more with Cray than with MS, if Linux continues to get market share in the low and mid-range Unix markets. And we know how hard it is to make money in the super computer market.
I'm more worried about what sun does with Java. But that a whole other thread.
What's Sun going to do with all the code still in Solaris to which they don't hold the rights to? Sun paid AT&T a big wad of change many years back so they didn't have to pay per-instance license fees (the fees that date back to the bad old days of UNIX). AFAIK, that fee did NOT buy the IP rights to the code. Even so, there's lots of other code in there which Sun does not own.
So here we go again (Netscape with Mozilla, SGI with XFS and OpenGL). A big company announces they are opening up their source to get brownie points with the OSS community and to get themselves lip service on Wall Street and a stock price goose, only to turn around a few weeks later and say "oh, well, we're not actually going to be able to ship anything close to a complete buildable code set because all these other companies [name them so the OSS community can then misdirect their anger at them] won't release their source code."
--Dave
First, it's important to realize that the North really fought the war with one hand behind it's back (I'm borrowing from historian Shelby Foote here). If you look at the other stuff going on in this period -- some minor indian wars, the homestead act, etc. The North was never really short on men in its army, but for a long time it was seriously short on the will to use them. If they'd ever were really needing men or supplies, they would have just taken that other hand out from behind their back.
From the numbers and stats I've seen, the black troops in the war had a fairly nominal effect (mostly because they were forbidden from actually fighting until fairly late in the conflict). If you can show me some data that suggests otherwise, I'll entertain it, but there's been quite a number of papers written in and around this area.
No, the biggest effect that emancipation had on the war was to prevent foreign powers from trying to mediate or meddle on behalf of the South -- Britain and France really missed the South's cotten, but because they were free countries they couldn't (politically) justify intervention once the war had formally become about slavery.
Besides, while there were some really old ideas held by the generals (notably the bayonette charge, which was obsolete the second the foundries started producting rifled barrels), it was a learning curve thing. The generals in the South, Lee and Jackson in particular, were bright enough to adapt their tactics fairly quickly (although Lee apparently forgot all these lessons at Gettysburg). The Northern high commanders not only didn't learn fast enough (Fredricksburg), but they also either froze up (Hooker and Pope) or wussed out (McClellan). Both of these are Very Bad Things(tm) from a tactical point of view.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
With everyone coming up with ideas of WHY Sun decided to do this, no ones mentioned the primary reason why they would open it up.
Sun has NEVER made money off of Solaris
That's right.. Not one dime. It costs them more to continue development of the OS then they recoupe in licensing costs. Sure, the license costs can be a bit steep, but that's more to cover the COST OF SUPPORT, NOT the cost of development. It does them NO HARM to open up the source. It's been available to educational institutions for a long time.
That, IMHO, was the deciding factor. They get several things out of opening it.
A: Free press coverage.
B: Free additional hardware support, at least for the x86 tree.
C: A little bit of a cash flow for anyone who uses it to make money.
D: Possible bug fixes to things they've never seen before
The question is, why would they NOT open up the source more earlier? It costs them $0.00.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
One of the virtues of, for example, FreeBSD is not just that it had many contributors, but that all code is checked by a core team of members before it is integrated, and that same core team controls the general direction of the OS (what threads implementation to use, ELF vs. a.out, etc.). Worries about code forking and other problems are a subset of this concern over control.
So yes, they're a big bad corporation, and maybe they're not doing this just because it's a Good Thing. Their worst-case scenario is for their OS, the only OS to run on their high end hardware, to integrate sizable contributions from the open source community that they later discover are buggy crap. So they need to interpose themselves as a middle layer (core team) to guarantee quality, and they can;t rely on just custom to do it, they need a legally binding agreement.
I wouldn't have done it any other way.
Xander
Again, we have many posts from people speculating about Sun's motives. I really have to wonder what kind of effect Oliver Stone has had on people.
Can we at least ACKNOWLEDGE some things here?
1) Sun is going to be opening up the source to their *FLAGSHIP PRODUCT*. Does anyone grasp what kind of step that IS? People are getting pissy about it NOT being a GPL, or Sun controlling the modifications that get added back into it. So WHAT? Would people rather they not do any of this? What would people gain?
2) Sometimes, centralized control is a GOOD thing. Linus keeps control of what goes into the Linux kernel (to generalize a bit), and this is a good thing- because who better than Linus to judge what modifications are good and what are going to break things, or what mods are just plain stupid? What is the difference between one person and an organization doing so? Is it actually so wrong for Sun to want to try to avoid some keener rewriting a piece of the kernel using MMX asm? Fine, every monkey who knows how to 'gcc hello.c' has the right to alter things the way he likes it, but does that same person have an automatic right to influence the executables that *I* run on *MY* system?
3) Not being accepted into the main source tree does not necessarily stop you from publishing your own mods. Fine, you didn't make it into the real tree. Publish a patch on your website. Let the public decide how useful the thing is.
4) Sun may be releasing the source to Solaris because... wait for it!... they think letting the public at the source is a GOOD idea! Whoa! No diabolical plans toward world domination. No teams of assassins waiting to "retire" RMS or ESR as soon as the public's attention is diverted. Can't something just be what it seems to be? Are there always secret plots behind everything? Scott McNealy has usually been vocal and forthright, sometimes even to his own detriment.
5) This whole source thing MAY NOT HAPPEN. There's a lot of stuff in Solaris which Sun doesn't personally own, and they might not have the right to open the guts of those items to the world.
There's more to say, but I don't think it would matter. Sun is damned if they do and damned if they don't. I'll leave people to return to their regularly-scheduled evil plot weaving.
--
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
I've got a buddy I've been trying to push towards Linux (gently, most of the time). I was talking to him about OSes (and maybe NCs?) in general and mentioned "Solaris". He had no idea what I was talking about (Then I mentioned e-bay and crashes, that opened a glimmer of recoginition).
My Point: anyone who (at this point) uses and develops for OSS would know the difference in licenses is not cosmetic, but cosmic. We'll see, but there's (plenty) enough paranoia about Big Business(tm) in the community and it's dogma to combat these tactics.
+&x
With as much traffic that has been devoted to the license on this new blurb, are we starting to see a new kind of splintering?
Everybody seems to think about splintering at the OS or distribution level... but are we seeing the first signs of license splintering? Are we going to start seeing developers move away from open source because of 20 billion different licenses? Will license splintering get down to a point where developers are going to stop dealing with open source, because they will need to get 30 lawyers to wade through the all of the licenseing mess just to release some software?
Just something to throw out, and see what opinions there might be on it.
I read with shock and incredulity the misinformation that Linux people are writing about Solaris.
It is *not* slow. It is *not* inferior to Linux. I *does* scale much better and have more business power features than Linux. It *does* have fewer drivers.
I also can't believe nobody with Solaris didn't shoot down some of the comments. One thing that Linux needs before it should be used in *any* business venture is a complete performance data gathering system that will provide detailed information about all the resources a system is using - otherwise it is impossible to profile for your performance goals.
Solaris is based almost entirely on shared libraries and deals with them well. It aggressively swaps out anything that is not in use - providing on my machine 70MB MORE DRIVE CACHING MEMORY than Linux was because it is intelligent enough to know when programs and program data are not in use - thus suitable for swap.
Solaris is vastly superior to Linux in many ways - if it gets the support to write drivers for legacy hardware and other Linux-isms, it would be a far better operating system than Linux will be for several years to come. No joke - DO NOT listen to the naysayers here, they are truly misinforming you.
...Steve
Sun doesn't get why Linux is so much a success.
Linux is successfull because of the GPL, not simply for its source code availability. Of course, GPL is not the only one issue, but still, it's the one that made the success of Linux.*BSDs (Free, Open and Net) would have succeed over Linux if code availability was the only issue: at the beginning of Linux, *BSD were based on much more mature code.
GPL means independance of business and marketing decisions, which often lead to technical and practical compromises. The GPL have something more than than *BSD's licence (and it's even more true for APSL and CSPL). This is the political inforcement of liberty. BSD-style licence are based on the statement: Liberty does not need laws to be maintained. GPL states: Liberty needs some laws to be protected. GPL does not trust business for their liberty. (And maybe that reveals a certain doubt among the community about the actual state of capitalism. I have to say that I believe that the GPL will eventually change the capitalism practices, that it will let competition alive, instead of being captured by monopolies)
So I think that all non-GPL-like licenses make the an compromise, that can be legitimised only by certain reasons. Business survival is, without any doubts, the most important of them. But you can detect which business is able to survive without total control on the product (SGI, IBM) because these companies are providing good service for many years. Sun has given good support for years, but the kill-Microsoft-at-all-price attitude is too strong to bypass that fear.
The Internet is forcing changes in software development just like everything else it touches.
Lucky for Sun that they make money from hardware. At least they have options for changing their software development model, no matter how feeble their initial response.
Microsoft on the other hand is screwed. The only alternatives I see for them is niche markets and services, neither of which they've done well in the past.
The whole perspective on this story has been on how will (a sort of) open source Solaris affect Linux. I don't think SUN's move is a reaction to Linux's success, but a stategy of giving away their software(Star Office and Solaris) to battle MS. Sun is both a hardware and software company. MS is ONLY a software company. If all software is free, what will MS live off of?
This reminds me of the strategy that MS used against Netscape, when they gave away IE.
I expect that Solaris will soon be free to all users for personal, development and commercial use.
Ok heres my question..
Can someone release patches to the original code base as separate entities under the GPL? The patches would not contain any code from the original code base (It could be done so that the patch is a set of replacement files)
This way The improvements would be available to the "Open Community" since they could get the SUN SCSLed code and then get the GPLed patches separately, then apply the patches. But it would prevent SUN from rolling up the changes into one ball and marketing that. SUN could of course also ship the GPLed patches separately.
The additional advantage to this would be that the code base would slowly but surely get GPLed. In fact SUN could change the license so that it can co-exist with the GPLed stuff. This way, they could ship the GPLed changes as well (provided of course that they ship the GPLed patch set in code form as well.) and the open source community does not have it's contributions "embraced and assimilated"
I think Sun's releasing the code so that they can wait a while and start suing people. After all, can any Linux distributor (Or Linus himself for that matter) prove that something in the OS wasn't taken from Solaris? If the source code is out there, it's rather difficult. Same thing goes for MS -- Sun could file a suit against MS for Win2K, claiming that MS nicked their SMP code or something.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My guess is that it's not to get linux users to defect, but to keep the solaris faithful in the fold. source is like the owners manual to my car. I expect it to be there, but i'll be damned if I ever look at it.
Under the Sun license we can not use it in commercial product withouth license fees. Well , at least this is my impression, no matter what you do -- you can not "Sell Linux", you can only sell the media... so in essence couldn't we take any code we wanted? poet@linuxports.com
I have to disagree. The Civil war was really the first modern war. Or at least the transitional one. Just look at Sherman's march to the sea.
One of the tragedies of WWI was that none of the European generals had learned any of the lesson of the Civil war, 50 years earlier. They were still trying to use cavalry against machine guns.
Sun can be restrictive with its license all it wants and still look good while retaining control. For them it's about PR and making MS look bad so that they can convince Corporate to spend large cash on Sun Equipment. It's the promose of things happening, without them actually happening.
Haven't educational institutions always had access to the Solrais source?
Not real big news.
Not really.
Remember, Sun is a corporation that's trying to gain some points in order to combat NT. If Sun actually sued, or threatened to sue, a Linux developer, there would be thousands of people who would vow to never, ever use Solaris or other Sun products again. In fact, this is true almost without reference to any fault on the part of the developer!
This isn't to say Sun is a perfect company, nor that they wouldn't do their best to support Solaris in favour of Linux, but they're not going to sue. Forget it.
D
----
As with GLX -- where making it free meant the MIT X license -- SGI are releasing things under the _appropriate_ license.
I'm sorry, but this is too little too late. If they're aiming for a Linux-type following, they can forget about it.
On the other hand, this is good news for people who have to use Solaris for one reason or another... nice to be able to fix things.
1. who cares? Linux can be made to be as reliable and robust as Solaris, but Solaris can't be made to be as fast on modest hardware as Linux is. Further, the SCSL has won the approval of exactly ZERO open-source advocates, so I don't think any of the idealist crowd will be switching over. 2. Does the SCSL prohibit us from incorporating their code into our projects, or from using *ideas* in their code in our projects? If not, I say we just JACK ALL THE GOOD STUFF out of Solaris. 3. But really, why would we want to do that, when SGI is going to *give* us most of what we need. They've given us XFS (coming soon? please?), they'll be adding ccNUMA support, who knows what's next? Their strategy seems to be taking the good stuff out of Irix and putting it in Linux cuz they can reach a lot more market with Linux (and the general consensus is 'Irix sucks'). And however you slice it, SGI is much "cooler" than Sun ;) MoNsTeR
It's amazing to me that the folks here are so willing to bash Sun mercilessly for taking a bold and quite significant step here.
Most people here act as if Sun wanted to control everything - look at their history:
- Bill Joy wrote Bekeley Unix, the first widespread implementation of a "source available" modern OS. One can make a good argument that without this impetus, Unix (and yes, Linux is a Unix) could not possibly exist as we know it today.
- Sun built and promoted NFS, which created the entire modern concept of reading/wrinting files over the network as if they were local. Then they did not try to make this proprietary, but made licenses available to all comers, even their competitors - unheard of at the time. This last time around, they made sure to involve many people from outside Sun in setting the NFS v3 standards.
- After falling into proprietary-think with NeWS and OpenLook/OpenWin, they realized their mistake (to their credit) and returned to the NFS model with the introduction of Java. Even that license has recently been opened up significantly, and now no longer requires improvements to be returned to Sun. (The only reason for that provision in the first place was to ensure the the entire community benefited from what anyone added, and was not a proprietary lock, but a non-proprietary lock.)
- Now, Sun is opening the source to very significant software products, Solaris and StarOffice.
It's true that Sun retains some control, but their motive, as shown repeatedly over time, is one of promoting consistency, not control. (Although the rise of Microsoft has pushed them back towards control - reasonably enough, they don't want competitors to take Sun's IP and club them over the head with it.)
In general, there may be some reasons to be wary of Sun, but their past actions show that they have been good stewards. Perhaps they should be given a chance before bashing them.
Sun's desire for "control" in each and every case can be shown to be a desire to ensure that their vision of computing can be carried out, and not co-opted by others with more proprietary intentions. Sun almost single-handedly revolutionized the computer industry by opening things up. unfortunately, most of the objectors I see speaking here are doing so from a position of arrogance and ignorance. Bother to learn the facts before you flame, and keep an open mind, for open source is no good without one.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
This is great news, great that we have a big pool of highquality code to look at and learn from. For people like me that works with mission critical big-iron Sun Enterprise servers all day its good to have access to the code sometimes if you hit some strange application behavior/problem, hopes the code for CDE is availble too that would be very usefull for Motif/X/CDE programming, also looking forward to read some of Sun engineers POSIX Threads source code.
Ha, they just got done arguing in court that KM did irreparable harm to them by downloading their source code.
Snicker.
On the gripping hand, I think the SCSL is a wee bit too restrictive. If they do anything, they should embrace Linux, shove the best parts of solaris into Linux, and have their own distro.
While I'm ranting about all this, I think it would be nice (since Sun owns Netscape) to help Netscape and Blackdown some more with their Java efforts. It's a pisser to go to www.gamelan.com and have have the applets either fail to load or crash (locking up the browser) within seconds.
I like Sun, but they are definately doing a fidgety little dance around the whole open source thing. Grow some nads and take charge, eh?
Copyright protects the expression, not the idea.
For example, I might be able to claim a copyright on the foregoing sentence, but you could still write: "Unlike the idea, copyright law protects only the expression."
Clean room applies to trade secrets, which are something different from copyright. You have to keep a trade secret secret. Sun can hardly claim a trade secret in something that it has published.
If you want intellectual property over an idea you have published, you need a patent.
Currently I see little threat from Linux for Sun. Solaris is a whole different ball-game than Linux.
Solaris has many of the features needed for large enterprise installations which Linux currently lacks (i.e. journalling file system). Solaris is also much more scalable than Linux. How well does Linux run on a 64 processor machine?
Also, I must say that my experience with both Solaris and Linux that Solaris is much more stable. I'm even running KDE on Solaris which makes the user interface quite usable. I don't know about the stability of the x86 version of Solaris, but I imagine that Sun is far more interested in the Sparc version.
On my Solaris box I've filled up all virtual memory, filled up the disk, crashed KDE, had the network go down, and it just keeps going. No crashes! My Redhat Linux box, on the other hand, frequently crashes for no apparent reason with an uptime of a couple of days between crashes. The hardware is just a generic Pentium system, 64MB RAM, S3 graphics adapter, IDE hard drive, Intel 10/100 NIC. Nothing special.
Both Linux and Solaris have all the latest patches and fixes installed.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Wait. Allow me to get this straight. Sun is going to allow people to develop their code for them and submit the changes. To do this, they are going to have to release the source for their x86 Solaris. Are they releasing the source for their SPARC Solaris? Because I honestly don't see a wh0ole lot of people abandoning a more mature OS for the x86(Linux) to go develop an OS that is sorely lacking in hardware support(x86 Solaris). And as for SPARC Solaris, how many of the people who are going to download it for free have the money to pick up an Ultra.
Sun could have done this three years ago and would likely have done very well. To do it now is as pointless as it is rediculous. My only concern is that, six months down the road, this will fail and it will cast a very negative light on the open-source movement.
--John Christensen
Sun has never made much money on Solaris. Check the cost of a license, esp. compared to competing Unixes. Most of their bottom line comes from hardware sales and service/support.
I can't wait to download so I can grep it for bad words.
As far as running solaris - FreeBSD is next on my list.
AFAIK the SCSL has been around for quite some time..
Ummm... Solaris is like huge compared to Linux. Plus, the networking is good. (Linux is having another rewrite; getting better.) How is Sun copying the success of Linux? It should be the other way around.
So here's a big company like Sun who owes the Linux community (or pretty much anybody else) NOTHING really. They took a look at what the Linux folks accomplished and took a couple of hints. They decided to let people look at their source. They probably thought they could get some good input from the community and it is a nice gesture, but remember that they don't owe this to anybody. The effext on Linux will probably be minimal, since as so many people pointed out, the SCSL is not nearly as free as the GPL. This is pretty much a non-issue. So Linux started the trend by showing that open source could be a good thing.... now anybody that ever touched a Linux box thinks that they are suddenly members of some sort of godlike awe-inspiring omnipotent body... People whine about how tough it is to implement Java and how bad it is and all that and how evil Sun is because they don't want everybody to exploit their intellectual property.... Simple. If you don't like Java, don't implement it. Create something new and free like the world did with Linux... oh, wait...Linux wasn't simply a good idea, it was also a long hard struggle, a LOT of work by a LOT of people, and just as much as anything else- timing. It's come a long way from a few years back before Linux started to hit the big time. I am constantly amazed here when I come to read the news and there is a story about something that isn't GPL'd or not directly related to Linux. Most of the people here tear it to shreds and get all indignant like it's not worthy to be on a page that also contains news about the Holy Work of Linus and Friends. Here's what I see: Sun SCSLs Solaris. This is a big step for Sun. I'm pretty impressed that they'd release it for people to see considering it's been at the core of their business since the beginning. Reaction from majority of /.ers: Sun sucks cause they won't give the entire thing away for free and allow us to steal everything we like to put in the Almighty LINUX!!! Solaris sucks rocks anyways because it's not the Amighty LINUX!!! How many of the people who talk so much trash about Solaris have ever used it (I mean on a real modern server or workstation.... not x86)? Well I'll tell you that I have and I like it a lot. It is rock solid, it's fairly secure, and when a bug is discovered, Sun has always been good about patches, and when you configure it properly, it is NOT slow. Earlier versions were doggy but it's much better these days. It's a good OS to work with. I use Linux on 2 machines at home and I think it's a fine OS and I rarely have trouble with it either, and everybody is right, patches and upgrades and blah blah come out so much more often for Linux...million of people working on it....blah blah. I gotta be brutally honest here and say that all those updates come out all the time for GPL'd software because it often isn't very well written in the first place. Not that it can't be fixed and turned into something great, but face it people, weekend code warriors generally don't turn out work as bulletproof as most companies software. It can get there after some revisions, but that's the down-side to the distributed development model- and the strength of a product like Solaris. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Why do so many people insist on blasting Sun for wanting to control the development of their own product? Flame away.
Yes, Sun is trying to profit off of the confusion between SCSL and a real open source license, as others have mentioned, and so we need to do some education to counteract that, pressure Sun to check their marketers a bit, and make sure people know that there are strings attached. Beyond that, I say more power to Sun! If I need to use Solaris, or Java, or StarOffice, for a project, I'd much rather have the source code than not.
As for those who say, "Sheesh, this is just a sneaky way for Sun to get us to fix their bugs for them, we better not let them," I think that if you work for a company that's going to use their products anyway, and you do find a bug, and you're a good enough debugger that you have a chance to fix it yourself rather than wait 6 months for Sun to do it, and if you can fix the bug on company time, then you're much better off fixing the bug, your company's better off, and so I'm glad that employees of companies which are already using Solaris have that option. In a sense this is no different than if you find a bug in Linux and fix it on company time, since you're getting paid either way, and either way you get the good feeling of knowing that you've helped made a critical piece of software is more reliable.
But, you might argue, "Well, if I help make Sun's software better, then they're going to make more money, and we can't have that now, can we?" You neglect the fact that Sun would've made just as much money and had just as many customers with or without your bug fix, and so the only real difference you've made is making life a little bit easier for the community of other users who are forced to deal with Solaris. And after all, that's why they call it a "community source license", because Sun really does want to make things better for their community of users, and hopefully in the end, with your bug fix, and thousands of others, they will have a slightly more reliable product and ultimately make slightly more money. And if that's a problem for you, then don't contribute! Some other Solaris user will likely find and fix the bug you would have fixed anyway.
But what if you go beyond fixing bugs and start adding new features to Solaris? Well, then, I can see some justification for being upset with the licensing terms. Suppose you add some better x86 hardware detection code to the Solaris installer and contribute it back to them. Then when Sun releases the next version of Solaris, they proudly point to their new WhizzyCoolInstall(tm) feature, and raise the price by $200. They sell a zillion copies of Solaris/x86 and cut into the Linux market a little. You're perceived as a sell-out, and nobody's happy, except Sun, and they stop being happy when everybody sees how you were treated and nobody else is foolish enough to add features to Solaris. What then?
In that case, I'd say, "don't do that then." If you have an idea for a great new feature, make it a loadable module. License it under whatever terms you want. With access to the Solaris code, you can easily make it work under Solaris, and you (or anyone else) can make it work under Linux too. If you were planning to release WhizzyCoolInstall under open source, then you weren't going to make any money off of it anyway, and this way, Sun can't turn around and use your new feature against Linux, because both OS's will have access to it. Everyone's happy, and the community of people who have to use Solaris, as well as the community of rabid Linux fan^H^H^Husers are both happy.
Honestly, I'm starting to think that /. has become physically incapable of seeing loaded issues like SCSL in their proper contexts. In the business world, most people are going to be thinking like me, so you might as well get used to it, and come up with some sort of realistic response, rather than "Sun must die." Especially since Sun's going to do it anyway, and their customers are going to be happy, and if you don't look at the issue from the POV I just gave, then you won't understand what happened.
--
Jake
If someone can write a driver to mount NTFS partitions read only, I'm there.
For not going to NT like a certain other company. I like Sun because they still sell and embrace unix. Sure they could have dropped it and went to NT, but they continue to approve upon it. Solaris is an excellant unix that scales well.
Sun is a company companies are interested in making money companies do not care about peoples' feelings Who cares what type of desktop you have on a server anyhow?
sun makes its money selling servers. so proliferating their platform makes sense. they'll just say, "hey! this code runs best on a sparc so buy one already!" they've seen linux' phenomenal growth and rapid advancement and they want a piece of that.
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
The above was funny... Sigh.
Someone else please do so.
I think that even if Sun's business offices are demanding that Solaris be "protected" by a restrictive license, many of the good things in Solaris can become good things in other OSs which also run on their hardware. If everybody plays this bridge hand the right way, other OSs could even develop library/binary compatibility with Solaris, so that Solaris applications can run unmodified in those environments. Besides simple application compatibility, this move could improve the hardware compatibility found in alternative operating systems.
Sun could win big by never having to update their OS again; they can make this happen simply by helping Solaris propagate all its good features elsewhere.
--
This is not my sandwich.
Quick question: how much do you have to pay for the compiler to compile this free source?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I don't know if you could have picked a more perfect example of the GPL at work. A number of compiler projects have forked off of GNU GCC. The most successful of these being EGCS. So successful in fact EGCS is now the official GNU GCC.
IIRC the reason for the fork was that a few developers were dissatisfied with the slow rate at which GNU GCC was progressing and formed the EGCS project.
In my eyes this is a prime example of how the GPL is supposed to work. Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken.
Kevin mitnick isn't a hacker. He's just a
scriptboy. A hacker creates useful things,
a cracker/scriptkiddy breaks useful things.
Did you notice crackers always see themselves
as guru's? Some sort of elite? I bet crackers
can't program drivers or fix hardware...
they make people who don't know any better think
they are computer-gods, which they're certainly
NOT!
Kevin mitnick isn't a hacker. He's just a
scriptboy. A hacker creates useful things,
a cracker/scriptkiddy breaks useful things.
Did you notice crackers always see themselves
as guru's? Some sort of elite? I bet crackers
can't program drivers or fix hardware...
they make people who don't know any better think
they are computer-gods, which they're certainly
NOT!
They should put Mitnick on the electric chair
for messing with software which took many hours
of work and engineering.
Think about it.
An opposing Unix system.
They have Star Office now.
They open the source to get media coverage.
They have never been Linux friendly.
I think they want to cut off Linux at the knees and use the office and any other software and developers they can steal to garner business support.
Just wait until they say something like "All the source you want, more stable, long history of support and office apps Linux doesn't have".
With enough FUD, they could be a serious threat simply because people are dumb and believe whatever they hear.
What happened to those Hard-core Linux users? The strength of Linux rests a comunity that doesn't blindly accept their "offers".
Here is an old tale: A man is walking along and finds a frozen snake. He takes it home and nurses it back to health. Then one day it bites him. As he lay dying he asks why it bit him. The snake replies "you knew what I was when you picked me up".
Give me GPL and shove your *PLs!
Wrong. This is a strategy to stop IBM. Sun is a hardware vendor. Software has always been supplement to hardware. IBM is making a big push in their AIX line servers. What Sun tries to do here is to stop their #1 enemy, IBM. IBM is Sun's biggest enemy. MS is not. MS is an irritation to Scott's psyche, but IBM is the one that can impact Sun's bottom line. Don't you people see that?
What is this fascination people have with playing DVD's on their computers? The LAST thing I'd want to do is plop down in my chair and stare at my 17" monitor if I wanted to watch the Matrix on DVD. I don't have a DVD setup but if I wanted one I'd just go out and buy a standalone player, hook it up to my 32" TV in the living room and watch it there where I can sit comfortably on my couch and vegetate. :-)
We recently switched to Linux for our web proxy server and I have to say I'm kind of disappointed we did now. I noticed Solaris 7 had UFS logging (aka journaling apparently) support which is a BIG plus in my book for both SGI's and Suns now. I can't afford to have my web proxy down for a half hour while the damned ext2 partitions fsck after a crash! I can shut off the fsck check at bootup but then I could end up with inconsistent filesystems. Not a decent solution. Linux needs XFS support NOW. Is anyone working on it?
you left out the SUBTLE IRONY tags
- It's not free as in beer you still have to pay for it
- It's not free as in speech can't fork, can't copy, can't distribute . .
. - But you have the right to fix it and not get paid or anything?
Bwah ha haAll commercial software should have this. This is better than Micro$oft getting testers to pay money for beta versions of NT
Sun has claimed they are finally going to make
an API for writing filesystems in solaris 8.
if that really materializes, all someone has
to do is port the linux NTFS driver.
The waiter analogy is bad because you're not paying anything. A better analogy is that you go to the supermarket, and there is a person handing outsamples, but the samples are cold. So you proceed to throw a temper tantrum because you are an ass.
Under the SCSL, I don't belive there can be anything like 'greenhat solaris'. Only Sun may sell the product, while you could put the app up on you're web/ftp server, you can't sell it.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
85% of Sun's revenue comes from hardware, the rest from software and services. Sun's gross margins on hardware are also about double that on software/services. ie they make about 90-95% of their profit from hardware.
(however, their fastest growing devision is the Enterprise Services division - ie supporting Starfire systems... But that's from a small start)
I'm rather worried about all of this "open source" software now...(yes I realize that the SCSL is not the GPL)
There are already _so_ many projects out there right now, that there aren't enough developers to maintain it all...I know developers will work on what they think is important, or what they are interested in, but I really hope that no one is betting the bank on getting free work by hackers around the world ('specially when its not even GPL)...it'll just look bad for OSS.
I'm all for OSS, and I comtribute when I can, I'm just a little worried....
This isn't the biggest deal since sliced bread you realize, Solaris isn't Sun's cash cow. Someone said the other day that if Soalris was open sourced it would be more popular than linux for servers. I think this is true for the most part, for super huge servers linux will work but FreeBSD would probably do it better while SOlaris would do it damned well but until now you couldn't just obtain a copy of Solaris. I see this as more of a push for linux onto desktops rather than big servers where it could do the job but not as well as other things. Sure some people want linux toothpaste but personally I would like to use what works for the job it needs to do.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
When are you going to grow up, "Sun"?
-- Use Microsoft
There are carcasses of IPC's and IPX's waiting to be shipped to salvage in our hallways, while PIII's running Linux, BSD, or NT are taking over the 400 desktops where the Sun/HP/DEC workstations used to live. And looking forward, its hard to imagine that a few years from now the Ultra I's won't be sitting out there in the hall too.
Sun better enjoy the glass room, cause its all that's left to them at this point ...
Yes, this is true. The Sun empire is extremely hardware focused. Their focus has moved more and more toward software(ie SIMS) but that has been a huge flop(their message store requires an engineer to baby it 24x7 - the chief architect for that was on crack). They are relegated to dicounting hardware to sell SIMS because it's such a piece of $#it. Anything to make marketing happy! That's another story... This hardware focus is primarily why their iplanet push will flop(despite what Sun's sales people will tell you). Mark my words. But yes Sun's main interest is selling the sparc architectured systems, so they give out the OS - it's not their focus.
Who cares about where someone is going to contribute. The people at Sun are not idiots, whether it be an advance for linux of solaris in the long run it will better the unix community. I'm sure they've learned some things from linux code and now we can learn from theirs. Its a big step from a major corporation and should be applauded. O.K., maybe only a half-step, but better then no step. No complaints here, just looking forward to browse the code.
I guess every body has their own opinions. In my opinon anybody who contributes code or fixes a bug for solaris or any other non open/free software is just another sucker (tm). These corporations know that a sucker is born every two minutes and they are going to exploit them as much as possible. If was to find a bug in a piece of software that I paid big bucks for and my only two choices were fix it yourself or wait six months to forever I would switch to a better product and or company.
War is necrophilia.
I'll just be happy to get a crack at fixing that stupid find bug in solaris 2.x which recurse into /net indefinitely!
...and let me at that Solstice Autosuite...
Uh, you dont think that companies are making BILLIONS of dollars off of GNU/Linux developers for free right now???????????
Check RHAT.
Dont work for companies for free.
I have my Linux box running for over 23 years straight now.
I think you might be confusing copyright with patents. Here's the deal:
A copyright basically has the following terms: You cannot reproduce a significant portion of this work without the persmission of the author.
A patent, more or less, means: You cannot use this implementation of this idea without permission of the author.
Unless Sun was able to go through the 'improved' Linux source code and find a 'significant' portion of the Solaris source reproduced there, they wouldn't even get to first base in a court case.
I see this as showing that Sun releasing their source code to the public could not be a way for them to try to hamper the development of Linux over copyright issues.
Bruce Perens[?] didn't share his insights with us this time, but he did post on the Talkback in the article. Click here.
Of course, that is what GNU does best.
Those that cannot do, copy those that can.
if you have a large service department?
That would suck.