Xorg continues to run fine on Solaris, since Oracle pays developers (including myself) to make sure Xorg continues to work and to contribute fixes upstream.
Xorg continues to run fine on most BSD's, since BSD developers continue to contribute fixes upstream to make that happen.
Of course, neither of those platforms get all the features, such as those requiring systemd/udev, because no one has stepped forward to write the code for them.
The Xorg server has never run on AIX, HPUX, or IRIX, since no one who used those platforms ever cared enough to port it. (Isn't IRIX EOL'ed by SGI now anyway?)
I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.
Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.
The Apple software team that just had to put out iOS 4.0.2 to fix the FreeType security hole that allowed people to jailbreak their phones (or get hacked by a more evil website with a malicious PDF)? If it's good enough for the company that originally developed TrueType and held the key patents, why not use FreeType?
What are Oracle’s plans for the GlassFish Enterprise (Java EE) Server after the transaction closes?
Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.
What are Oracle’s plans for NetBeans?
Oracle has a strong track record of demonstrating commitment to choice for Java developers. As such, NetBeans is expected to provide an additional open source option and complement to the two free tools Oracle already offers for enterprise Java development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. While Oracle JDeveloper remains Oracle’s strategic development tool for the broad portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware products and for Oracle’s next generation of enterprise applications, developers will be able to use whichever free tool they are most comfortable with for pure Java and Java EE development: JDeveloper, Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, or NetBeans.
And how about the entire population of baby boomers as they age and start having their eyesight detoriate? Designing for accessibility helps more than just those traditionally thought of as handicapped - it's also helpful for the elderly and people on different browser types than what you design for (say a Linux box without their ActiveX plugins, or a cell phone/PDA without flash).
It's in code that allows you to do things like load code modules from other paths, so it's only allowed if you're already root or not running setuid-root. (It should probably check that you're not running setuid at all, but there's no real point having Xorg setuid to anyone but root, so no one has added that check.)
The bug was only introduced in January 2005 - and honestly, every time I looked at that code during the Xorg 6.9/7.0 development cycle, my brain automatically filled in the parentheses. Unless you're looking for it, it's easy to miss when reading the code.
The flaw may have been corrected in the source tree, but that says nothing for the tens of millions of X11 systems out in the field yet.
It's unlikely there are tens of millions of systems affected by this - the bug was introduced during 6.9 development - only Solaris 10 and Fedora 5 had shipped 6.9 or 7.0 in a stable release by the time it was found. Everyone else still had it only in their testing branches.
gcc 3.4.3 says all is fine. You can make it complain if you change geteuid != 0 to !geteuid - then it points out "warning: the address of `geteuid', will always evaluate as `true'"
Wasn't there still some problem like the DRI DRM not being ported or something?
DRI & DRM are not yet ported, but are being worked on. Without them you lose some hardware acceleration. (Though you don't need them for full hardware acceleration on nVIDIA cards if you use nVIDIA's recently released Solaris x86/x64 driver.)
This [link to Phil Brown's community agpgart driver] didn't work for me when I tried a few months back.
I hope this will lead to desktop/laptop drivers being ported. I like Sun's Unix environment, so I'd really like to be able to run Solaris as a secondary OS on my laptop.
Since Solaris 10 defaults to Xorg on x86 machines, most video cards with open source drivers are now supported. Drivers for other laptop hardware, like wireless networking, are still needed, but a lot of Sun's engineers now run Solaris on their laptops, so getting the missing drivers ready is getting a lot of attention.
To be clear -- it's SuSE from about two years ago, not current SuSE.
Actually, it's based on SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0, which SuSE released last year and has not yet updated itself, so it is a current SuSE, just not their more quickly updated consumer release.
The xorg server is compatible with XFree86 drivers - it's based on a blend of the traditional X.org X11R6.6 release and XFree86 4.4RC2 (the last before the license change). It's the one the cygwin group has adopted for their X server going forward after they decided they couldn't work with the XFree86 people anymore.
The X Consortium had nothing to do with it - it hasn't existed since 1994. This license change was done by the XFree86 Project, Inc.
The current successor of the X Consortium is the X.org Foundation, which has not adopted this new license, and in fact, has stopped importing code from XFree86 into the X.org CVS tree because of it.
GNOME 2.0.2 is builtin to Solaris 9 8/03 and later releases. For earlier Solaris 9 and Solaris 8 releases, you'll need the web download from http://www.sun.com/gnome to get GNOME 2.0.
Linux can not possibly infringe. It was made from scratch.
You cannot possibly know this. Thousands of people
have contributed code to the Linux kernel - did you
watch every single one of them to verify that they
did not copy from some other source, either with or
without the permission of the copyright holder?
Do you have access to every single copyrighted bit of source code in the world to check against?
(Of course, some of SCO's statements make it sound like Linus is guilty of gross negligence in checking code into the Linux source without performing these impossible tasks first.)
IBM has admitted publically that it contributed code that came from other OS'es, code to which it believed it owned the full rights to contribute, but which SCO is now claiming it did not. At the
core, that's the issue SCO is suing IBM over.
To use them SUN would need to change the license of their kernel to something GPL friendly.
Why don't they do this?
Because Sun can't do it without the permission of every other company that owns copyright on any file included in the Solaris kernel, including the SVR4 bits from SCO.
usually a patent is 17 years with the potential for a 17 year extension, at least thats what I thought. UNIX was patented 35 years ago wasnt it? What's the deal?
Only if you assume that patents are relevant to the SCO lawsuit, and that nothing added to Unix in the last 35 years was patentable. SCO has indicated that the first is not really true, and anyone who's used Unix for a while knows that a vast quantity of additions and innovations have been made much more recently than 1968 (especially considering it wasn't released until after that). Patents cover a specific technique or algorithm, not a general product with thousands of components. (The most famous Unix patent is probably 4,135,240 from 1973 - Dennis Ritchie's patent on the setuid bit, which AT&T released to the public domain years ago.)
The only problem with that is SCO has never owned the UNIX trademark. Novell gave the trademark to
X/Open (now part of the Open Group) before selling the rest of it's UNIX business to SCO. Anyone who produces an OS that passes the compliance test suites and pays money to the Open Group to certify their test results can use the UNIX trademark. (See http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/the_brand.html for the exact requirements.)
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Xorg continues to run fine on Solaris, since Oracle pays developers (including myself) to make sure Xorg continues to work and to contribute fixes upstream. Xorg continues to run fine on most BSD's, since BSD developers continue to contribute fixes upstream to make that happen. Of course, neither of those platforms get all the features, such as those requiring systemd/udev, because no one has stepped forward to write the code for them. The Xorg server has never run on AIX, HPUX, or IRIX, since no one who used those platforms ever cared enough to port it. (Isn't IRIX EOL'ed by SGI now anyway?)
Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.
The Apple software team that just had to put out iOS 4.0.2 to fix the FreeType security hole that allowed people to jailbreak their phones (or get hacked by a more evil website with a malicious PDF)? If it's good enough for the company that originally developed TrueType and held the key patents, why not use FreeType?
Solaris Express (the current development release) already has GNOME 2.16, HAL, D-BUS, and Xorg 7.2. An update to GNOME 2.18 is in progress.
A non-anonymous source inside Sun, who just happens to be Sun's VP of Software, has refuted eWeek's rumor spreading.
And how about the entire population of baby boomers as they age and start having their eyesight detoriate? Designing for accessibility helps more than just those traditionally thought of as handicapped - it's also helpful for the elderly and people on different browser types than what you design for (say a Linux box without their ActiveX plugins, or a cell phone/PDA without flash).
It's in code that allows you to do things like load code modules from other paths, so it's only allowed if you're already root or not running setuid-root. (It should probably check that you're not running setuid at all, but there's no real point having Xorg setuid to anyone but root, so no one has added that check.)
The bug was only introduced in January 2005 - and honestly, every time I looked at that code during the Xorg 6.9/7.0 development cycle, my brain automatically filled in the parentheses. Unless you're looking for it, it's easy to miss when reading the code.
It's unlikely there are tens of millions of systems affected by this - the bug was introduced during 6.9 development - only Solaris 10 and Fedora 5 had shipped 6.9 or 7.0 in a stable release by the time it was found. Everyone else still had it only in their testing branches.
The exploit mentioned in this article cannot be exploited by a user who isn't logged into your system - you have to be able to run the Xorg command with certain options. See X.Org's advisory at http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ma rch/013992.html
Wasn't there still some problem like the DRI DRM not being ported or something?
DRI & DRM are not yet ported, but are being worked on. Without them you lose some hardware acceleration. (Though you don't need them for full hardware acceleration on nVIDIA cards if you use nVIDIA's recently released Solaris x86/x64 driver.)
This [link to Phil Brown's community agpgart driver] didn't work for me when I tried a few months back.
Solaris now includes its own agpgart driver, based in part on Phil's driver, as of the Solaris development build released today, and provides the source as well in OpenSolaris - see http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/uts /i86pc/io/agpgart/
I hope this will lead to desktop/laptop drivers being ported. I like Sun's Unix environment, so I'd really like to be able to run Solaris as a secondary OS on my laptop.
Since Solaris 10 defaults to Xorg on x86 machines, most video cards with open source drivers are now supported. Drivers for other laptop hardware, like wireless networking, are still needed, but a lot of Sun's engineers now run Solaris on their laptops, so getting the missing drivers ready is getting a lot of attention.
Actually the underlying distro is SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0, as noted in Sun's Java Desktop System FAQ.
Actually, it's based on SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0, which SuSE released last year and has not yet updated itself, so it is a current SuSE, just not their more quickly updated consumer release.
- xserver
- the experimental, kdrive-based branch started by Keith Packard
- xorg - the X release of the newly-reformed X.org Foundation.
The xorg server is compatible with XFree86 drivers - it's based on a blend of the traditional X.org X11R6.6 release and XFree86 4.4RC2 (the last before the license change). It's the one the cygwin group has adopted for their X server going forward after they decided they couldn't work with the XFree86 people anymore.The X Consortium has made this software non-free.
The X Consortium had nothing to do with it - it hasn't existed since 1994. This license change was done by the XFree86 Project, Inc.
The current successor of the X Consortium is the X.org Foundation, which has not adopted this new license, and in fact, has stopped importing code from XFree86 into the X.org CVS tree because of it.
You mean except for the $995 workstations and servers they've been selling the past three years?
GNOME 2.0.2 is builtin to Solaris 9 8/03 and later releases. For earlier Solaris 9 and
Solaris 8 releases, you'll need the web download from http://www.sun.com/gnome to get GNOME 2.0.
You cannot possibly know this. Thousands of people have contributed code to the Linux kernel - did you watch every single one of them to verify that they did not copy from some other source, either with or without the permission of the copyright holder? Do you have access to every single copyrighted bit of source code in the world to check against? (Of course, some of SCO's statements make it sound like Linus is guilty of gross negligence in checking code into the Linux source without performing these impossible tasks first.)
IBM has admitted publically that it contributed code that came from other OS'es, code to which it believed it owned the full rights to contribute, but which SCO is now claiming it did not. At the core, that's the issue SCO is suing IBM over.
To use them SUN would need to change the license of their kernel to something GPL friendly.
Why don't they do this?
Because Sun can't do it without the permission of every other company that owns copyright on any file included in the Solaris kernel, including the SVR4 bits from SCO.
Those are XFree86 video card modules, which are under the MIT/X license (similar to the BSD license without the advertising clause).
usually a patent is 17 years with the potential for a 17 year extension, at least thats what I thought. UNIX was patented 35 years ago wasnt it? What's the deal?
Only if you assume that patents are relevant to the SCO lawsuit, and that nothing added to Unix in the last 35 years was patentable. SCO has indicated that the first is not really true, and anyone who's used Unix for a while knows that a vast quantity of additions and innovations have been made much more recently than 1968 (especially considering it wasn't released until after that). Patents cover a specific technique or algorithm, not a general product with thousands of components. (The most famous Unix patent is probably 4,135,240 from 1973 - Dennis Ritchie's patent on the setuid bit, which AT&T released to the public domain years ago.)
The UC Berkeley Computer Science Department teaches a somewhat similar class - CS 195: Social Implications of Computing. You might find some interesting reading material in the publications mentioned in their Fall 2002 Syllabus.
There's sure to be some fodder for discussion on the web pages of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACM SIGCAS: Special Interest Group on Computers and Society, ACM Computing & Public Policy, Computers, Freedom, & Privacy Conference, and The IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology, to name just a few.
The only problem with that is SCO has never owned the UNIX trademark. Novell gave the trademark to X/Open (now part of the Open Group) before selling the rest of it's UNIX business to SCO. Anyone who produces an OS that passes the compliance test suites and pays money to the Open Group to certify their test results can use the UNIX trademark. (See http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/the_brand.html for the exact requirements.)