Open Solaris

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BONZI

Journeyman
Come february and solaris is open source. I found it in a magazine.

The SUN is about to shine brighter on the open source community. Writes the magazine.

Isnt that a good news an alternative within the open source OS? Or is there a danger that the community resource will be split to linux and solaris. Anyway it seems that sun is following the footsteps of Linux. They say that they have an ongoing project janus which will enable linux based applications to run on solaris. Who knows it could be another Lindows :)
 

swatkat

Technomancer
Yes,Solaris 10 is made as Open source,free OS to attract more consumers.It's going to give death blow to competition,that is if they are finacially stable to sustain the initial losses occur due to the "Open source"ing the OS,since the development involved an investment of 500million dollars.
Sun plans to charge for Updates and Services instead of OS.
Read more:-
*www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,65712,00.html?tw=wn_10techhead
 

pradeep_chauhan

Cyborg Agent
please do not expect too much even solaris 9 is a free download. So i did download the OS last year (i still run it .... sometimes mainly for performance modelling) and to my horror i found that only the basic os is free all support items like a browser xwindows etc are not free so in the end you are stuck with a functional but incomplet OS that is not very practical. This was the case for solaris 9 i wonder if any changes are there in solaris 10.
 
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BONZI

Journeyman
They say that they are going to remove all the prop code from solaris. I think solaris is also based on unix. So what the probably do is add support to *nix software. So effectively it could be just another flavour of linux :)
 

tuXian

In the zone
Open Really?

Sun Microsystems Inc. has already raised the ire of many in the open-source and Linux (news - web sites) community with its submission of a new open-source license proposal for Open Solaris.

The Santa Clara, Calif., company last month quietly submitted for approval the new CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) to the Open Source Initiative, a nonprofit group that reviews licenses and awards official open-source status to those that meet the OSI's Open Source Definition.

The problem, sources said, is that the CDDL will have conflicts with the GPL (GNU General Public License), which will discourage developers from participating in the Open Solaris project, further shunning Sun from the open-source community.

The CDDL is a modified version of the MPL (Mozilla Public License Version 1.1). In an official statement accompanying the CDDL proposal, Sun officials said none of the more than 50 open-source licenses currently approved by the OSI was acceptable to Sun's specific needs.

"The MPL came closest to meeting our needs," the proposal reads. "We felt that it had a number of issues, though, which prevented us from simply using that license or one of its variants."

The OSI will announce in the next few weeks if the license meets the Open Source Definition. The fact that a license is not compatible with the GPL does not preclude it from being certified as open source, as long as it meets the OSI criteria for being "open" and the code can be shared among contributors and redistributed by them.

Eric Raymond, president of the OSI, in Malvern, Pa., would not comment on the CDDL submission but expressed doubts to eWEEK earlier this year about the usefulness of many open licenses. "Most of the new licenses we've seen in the last five years are acts of vanity that didn't actually solve any substantive or legal problems," he said at the time.

Sun officials, including Chief Operating Officer and President Jonathan Schwartz, have long said that they will seek a license approved by the OSI for Open Solaris and that they have reservations about using the GPL. But they have not said they are considering a license that is incompatible with the GPL, the most widely used open-source license, which governs the Linux kernel.

Claire Giordano, a member of Sun's CDDL team, said in a letter accompanying the submission that "like the Mozilla Public License, the CDDL is not expected to be compatible with the GPL, since it contains requirements that are not in the GPL. Thus, it is likely that files released under the CDDL will not be able to be combined with files released under the GPL to create a larger program."

Simon Phipps, Sun's chief technology evangelist, said that the CDDL is open to comment and that Sun is still working on it. Phipps would not comment on the issue of its GPL compatibility except to say that the Mozilla license and several other open-source licenses are incompatible with the GPL. "The debate isn't finished," he said. "There are still multiple Opinions inside Sun on which license to use for Open Solaris, and we are still looking at other options."

Some open-source developers are angered by the CDDL move because Sun has already integrated some GPL technologies into Solaris. Now, they said, Sun merely wants to stop its own technologies licensed under the CDDL from getting into GPL-licensed software projects. "I suspect Sun would be overjoyed if open-source software continued to flourish, but Linux somehow vanished from the scene," said Con Zymaris, CEO of Cybersource Pty. Ltd., a Linux and open-source solutions company in Melbourne, Australia. "I will now have to choose between supporting development and adding momentum to Open Solaris or to Linux. I will choose Linux. Our customers have."

Some of Sun's largest competitors are welcoming the dissention over the CDDL. Efrain Rovira, worldwide director of Linux marketing for Hewlett-Packard Co., in Palo Alto, Calif., said he enjoys competing with Sun when it continues to make mistakes such as this.

"They will not be able to build a viable community to support Open Solaris if they use the CDDL," Rovira said. "What they are saying to the community about their support for open source and Linux is that they are half pregnant. There are no half measures here: You either are or you aren't. This is part of the schizophrenic attitude we continue to see coming out of Sun."

Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds (news - web sites) also weighed in, saying he believes that, from Sun's perspective, the CDDL had to be incompatible with the GPL. Sun "wants to keep a moat against the barbarians at the gate," he wrote in an e-mail interview. Torvalds said he does not expect developers clamoring to start playing with that source code.

"Nobody wants to play with a crippled version [of Solaris]. I, obviously, do believe that they'll have a hard time getting much of a community built up," Torvalds wrote. "I think there are parallels with the Java 'we'll control the process' model. I personally think that their problem is that they want to control the end result too much, and because of that they won't get any of the real advantages of open source."
 

aku

Gonna make it BiG
Hety guys can any one of u tell me from where 2 get Solaris 10 in Kolkata? OR IS NAY MAG GONNA DISTRIBUTE IT? PLS B QUICK :D
 

tuxly

Broken In
thanks bonzi and tuxian for enlightening

but with ref to tuxians info what is solaris heading towards??
 
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