Sun paid SCOX money for x86 device drivers. Quite clearly, this means that there is no basis for a lawsuit by SCOX against Sun because there is a valid license agreement for which money has changed hands.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl should help. If your laptop's features can be found on the list the Solaris should just work on it.
You could just give it a go anyway and see whether anything breaks. If nothing breaks, add it to the HCL. If something breaks, then let Sun know so their engineering teams can fix it.
From what I've heard (from friends who work at Sun) the old wifi(prism) cards should work but I'm not sure whether the driver is available externally to the public yet.
Gee, did you actually read the article that was splashed across sun.com? ZFS is designed - quite obviously - to take out the need for someone to install VxVM and VxFS. It's not a renamed product. It's not a "we've bought these from Veritas" scenario. It's a "let's take a large chunk of money away from Veritas" scenario.
Spend USD500million on staff salaries + cost of their offices + cost of their workstations + cost of test systems + cost of new hardware platforms +.... It all adds up you know, and it's all R and D spending. If you can put a cost on it, you can probably claim it as a tax deduction.
Gee, do you actually bother to do any research before blowing out the "Sun paid SCOX money therefore SUN must be bad" smoke?
Sun paid money to SCOX for some device drivers.
Years ago (matter of public record in I think 1992 or 1993) Sun paid money to whoever really owned Unix at the time so that they could develop Solaris and derivative works without any encumbrance.
If you bothered to pay attention to what McSwartz et al have actually said, the licensing of Solaris will not be GPL. It probably won't be BSD. But it will be OSI-approved.
And funnily enough, Solaris does include tech. from other companies -- and all that licensing has to be resolved before Solaris can be opened up. Remember, we're talking about a company here, and companies can be sued. Better to resolve licensing issues first, don't you think?
BTW, you have no idea why Sun decided to include Perl in Solaris (as/usr/bin/perl no less rather than on the freeware cd).
There are engineering costs associated with having GNU and other open-source projects included in Solaris. Don't assume that their absence is due to design despots. Think about engineering processes from a cost-of-maintenance point of view and you might get moving in the right direction.
Sun's management has said (if you'd followed this story) that Sun will almost certainly not be releasing Solaris 10 under a GPL or BSD license.
The licensing is being worked on. Don't make pronouncements about it until you see it or you'll look more foolish than you do now.
The comments that I've heard (from people who are in the know re opensourcing solaris) are that it is definitely coming, it's not just a marketing gimmick.
Do you actually work for a corporation? Doesn't sound like it. The corporations I know (and I include universities here) do care about quality, do care about stability, and do care about support.
Because they care about support corporations also care about OS release cycles -- if their app vendor has not certified on a newer release of the OS, then the customer does not install it.
How do you know what "most of SUN's engineers" want? Have you polled them? Do you have a clue? As another poster has pointed out, you appear to have a political issue rather than fact-based engineering issue. It is quite painfully obvious that you do not understand Sun's business plan or business model.
People run linux/sparc generally because they want to squeeze some more life out of an old machine. People run Solaris/sparc (or Solaris/x86 for that matter) because they want to run a very stable OS that has huge application support, a very responsive developer base and excellent hardware support.
For those who diss Solaris/x86, think about the time it takes you to get your pc to run linux or another free unix variant, and compare it to the effort that Sun puts in to making Solaris/x86 work on specific hardware listed in the HCL (http://access1.sun.com and follow the links). If you build a system from bits listed in the HCL then you will get a working Solaris/x86 system. (Start with a listed motherboard and save yourself some pain....)
I work for Sun as a tier 3 support engineer. I don't see more than 10 percent of the calls that come in because our tier 1 and 2 engineers solve 90 percent of the problems. We train people to do the job right. We do charge a lot for support contracts - I don't do the pricing, but I know that my time and our developers' time costs a lot to provide.
Somebody else complained about larger companies ditching calls on technicalities. To that I say: large companies like Sun support _known_ configurations of hw and sw. Patches are included as a known configuration. If you are unwilling to apply a patch ("but how can I be sure it fixes my problem?") then you are really doing yourself a disservice. Why? Companies like Sun produce patches to fix problems, and asking customers to apply one or more patches is a due diligence thing: we want to get rid of side or chaff issues which might be masking a real problem. Time is money, and we prefer not to fix the same problem over and over, wasting your time and ours.
What makes you so sure that Sun will do something evil with the license? Anyway, it's not about trusting Sun to do what is best for [you], it's about recognising that there is more than one way to license software and make it freely available at the same time.
If you want to stick with KOffice, do so. If you want to use StarOffice and accept the SCSL like everybody else who uses it, do so. The SCSL is actually a very diplomatic and sensible one (yes, I do work for Sun, but I've been watching licensing of many types for 10 years). Yes, the source is coming, and yes, if you make changes and want them published you have to send them back to Sun. What is so difficult or non-transparent about that? It's actually very similar to the linux kernel system if you look at it for more than a second.
Slashdot Mirror
blogs.sun.com perchance? There are a number of
;)
the ZFS team who have blogs.
There is also leakage from customers on beta
programs -- despite best efforts
Sun paid SCOX money for x86 device drivers. Quite
clearly, this means that there is no basis for a
lawsuit by SCOX against Sun because there is a
valid license agreement for which money has changed
hands.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl should help. If
your laptop's features can be found on the list
the Solaris should just work on it.
You could just give it a go anyway and see whether
anything breaks. If nothing breaks, add it to the
HCL. If something breaks, then let Sun know so
their engineering teams can fix it.
From what I've heard (from friends who work at
Sun) the old wifi(prism) cards should work but
I'm not sure whether the driver is available
externally to the public yet.
No, Sun is finding that removing licensing restrictions
from other companies is quite tedious.
Gee, did you actually read the article that was
splashed across sun.com? ZFS is designed - quite
obviously - to take out the need for someone to
install VxVM and VxFS. It's not a renamed product.
It's not a "we've bought these from Veritas"
scenario. It's a "let's take a large chunk of money
away from Veritas" scenario.
Spend USD500million on staff salaries + cost .... It all adds up you know, and
of their offices + cost of their workstations +
cost of test systems + cost of new hardware
platforms +
it's all R and D spending. If you can put a cost
on it, you can probably claim it as a tax deduction.
Gee, do you actually bother to do any research
before blowing out the "Sun paid SCOX money
therefore SUN must be bad" smoke?
Sun paid money to SCOX for some device drivers.
Years ago (matter of public record in I think 1992
or 1993) Sun paid money to whoever really
owned Unix at the time so that they could develop
Solaris and derivative works without any encumbrance.
If you bothered to pay attention to what McSwartz
et al have actually said, the licensing of Solaris
will not be GPL. It probably won't be BSD. But
it will be OSI-approved.
And funnily enough, Solaris does include tech.
from other companies -- and all that licensing
has to be resolved before Solaris can be opened
up. Remember, we're talking about a company here,
and companies can be sued. Better to resolve
licensing issues first, don't you think?
Check your facts before you smoke and comment.
Isn't "marketing engineers" an oxymoron?
/usr/bin/perl no less
BTW, you have no idea why Sun decided to
include Perl in Solaris (as
rather than on the freeware cd).
There are engineering costs associated with
having GNU and other open-source projects
included in Solaris. Don't assume that their
absence is due to design despots. Think about
engineering processes from a cost-of-maintenance
point of view and you might get moving in the
right direction.
Sun's management has said (if you'd followed this
story) that Sun will almost certainly not
be releasing Solaris 10 under a GPL or BSD license.
The licensing is being worked on. Don't make
pronouncements about it until you see it or you'll
look more foolish than you do now.
The comments that I've heard (from people who
are in the know re opensourcing solaris)
are that it is definitely coming, it's not just
a marketing gimmick.
Do you actually work for a corporation? Doesn't
sound like it. The corporations I know (and I
include universities here) do care about
quality, do care about stability, and
do care about support.
Because they care about support corporations also
care about OS release cycles -- if their app
vendor has not certified on a newer release of the
OS, then the customer does not install it.
How do you know what "most of SUN's engineers"
want? Have you polled them? Do you have a clue?
As another poster has pointed out, you appear
to have a political issue rather than fact-based
engineering issue. It is quite painfully obvious
that you do not understand Sun's business plan
or business model.
So in summary, *BSD is dying, and SYSV rocks!
People run linux/sparc generally because they want to squeeze some more life out of an old machine. People run Solaris/sparc (or Solaris/x86 for that matter) because they want to run a very stable OS that has huge application support, a very responsive developer base and excellent hardware support.
For those who diss Solaris/x86, think about the time it takes you to get your pc to run linux or another free unix variant, and compare it to the effort that Sun puts in to making Solaris/x86 work on specific hardware listed in the HCL (http://access1.sun.com and follow the links). If you build a system from bits listed in the HCL then you will get a working Solaris/x86 system. (Start with a listed motherboard and save yourself some pain....)
SVR4!!!
I work for Sun as a tier 3 support engineer. I don't see more than 10 percent of the calls that come in because our tier 1 and 2 engineers solve 90 percent of the problems. We train people to do the job right. We do charge a lot for support contracts - I don't do the pricing, but I know that my time and our developers' time costs a lot to provide.
Somebody else complained about larger companies ditching calls on technicalities. To that I say: large companies like Sun support _known_ configurations of hw and sw. Patches are included as a known configuration. If you are unwilling to apply a patch ("but how can I be sure it fixes my problem?") then you are really doing yourself a disservice. Why? Companies like Sun produce patches to fix problems, and asking customers to apply one or more patches is a due diligence thing: we want to get rid of side or chaff issues which might be masking a real problem. Time is money, and we prefer not to fix the same problem over and over, wasting your time and ours.
What makes you so sure that Sun will do something evil with the license? Anyway, it's not about trusting Sun to do what is best for [you], it's about recognising that there is more than one way to license software and make it freely available at the same time.
If you want to stick with KOffice, do so. If you want to use StarOffice and accept the SCSL like everybody else who uses it, do so. The SCSL is actually a very diplomatic and sensible one (yes, I do work for Sun, but I've been watching licensing of many types for 10 years). Yes, the source is coming, and yes, if you make changes and want them published you have to send them back to Sun. What is so difficult or non-transparent about that? It's actually very similar to the linux kernel system if you look at it for more than a second.