Give it a shot! Bear in mind that driver support is driven toward servers on X86 and if you have a newish l337 workstation your probly going to be upset at the lack of driver support for all your l337 gear. This is why OpenSolaris is going to be really really kool, we'll finally be able to help Sun fill in a lot of missing driver support on X86 among other things (Portage on Solaris!).
What you'll lack in drivers you'll make up for with DTrace, Zones, and the new SMF (RC Init replacement, try the "svcs" command).
Why make this more than it is? Its all a matter of which direction you look at this from. As a pilot member I can assure you that there has been no talk of the 1600 patents previous to the announcement. The CDDL was carefully crafted to provide for the needs of everyone. The patent issue is really just a secondary point that has become a marketing talking for the Sun PR core.
Notice, in the CDDL, section 2.1b releaves the contributor of "Patent Claims infringed by the making, using or selling of Original Software, to make, have made, use, practice, sell, and offer for sale, and/or otherwise dispose of the Original Software (or portions thereof)."
As so many folks have pointed out, you can't open the source to Solaris with so many patents in it and then restrict the ability for a contributor to utilize those patents, so they delt with this issue directly in the CDDL. This was widely discussed both inside and outside of Sun, and something everyone was careful about. When the PR core started tossing around this 1,600 number last week it took a lot of people by surprise and discarded many of us who don't care if it's 5 patents or 50,000 patents, it's all the same to us.
This is a case of Sun trying to please both the community ("OpenSolaris licensed by the CDDL, an OSI approved license based on MPL!") and wall street ("1600 Patents for use!").
Sun has no interest in pulling a MS/SCO move and just start suing people. Sun is thankfully the kind of company that would contact you and discuss a problem if there was one before just mailing out a court order.
Is Sun making too much hooplah about the patents? I think so, but thats what PR depts do, for better or worse. Sun isn't saying that their giving away ALL the patents, just the ones related to the code in OpenSolaris, which is just what we need.
benr. [OpenSolaris community member, NOT a Sun employee]
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http://cuddletech.com/ So make a better one. ;)
Give it a shot! Bear in mind that driver support is driven toward servers on X86 and if you have a newish l337 workstation your probly going to be upset at the lack of driver support for all your l337 gear. This is why OpenSolaris is going to be really really kool, we'll finally be able to help Sun fill in a lot of missing driver support on X86 among other things (Portage on Solaris!).
What you'll lack in drivers you'll make up for with DTrace, Zones, and the new SMF (RC Init replacement, try the "svcs" command).
Why make this more than it is? Its all a matter of which direction you look at this from. As a pilot member I can assure you that there has been no talk of the 1600 patents previous to the announcement. The CDDL was carefully crafted to provide for the needs of everyone. The patent issue is really just a secondary point that has become a marketing talking for the Sun PR core.
Notice, in the CDDL, section 2.1b releaves the contributor of "Patent Claims infringed by the making, using or selling of Original Software, to make, have made, use, practice, sell, and offer for sale, and/or otherwise dispose of the Original Software (or portions thereof)."
As so many folks have pointed out, you can't open the source to Solaris with so many patents in it and then restrict the ability for a contributor to utilize those patents, so they delt with this issue directly in the CDDL. This was widely discussed both inside and outside of Sun, and something everyone was careful about. When the PR core started tossing around this 1,600 number last week it took a lot of people by surprise and discarded many of us who don't care if it's 5 patents or 50,000 patents, it's all the same to us.
This is a case of Sun trying to please both the community ("OpenSolaris licensed by the CDDL, an OSI approved license based on MPL!") and wall street ("1600 Patents for use!").
Sun has no interest in pulling a MS/SCO move and just start suing people. Sun is thankfully the kind of company that would contact you and discuss a problem if there was one before just mailing out a court order.
Is Sun making too much hooplah about the patents? I think so, but thats what PR depts do, for better or worse. Sun isn't saying that their giving away ALL the patents, just the ones related to the code in OpenSolaris, which is just what we need.
benr. [OpenSolaris community member, NOT a Sun employee]