Shawn Walker a ?crit : > It's pretty clear what licensing applies where. Though I agree that > information could be better consolidate into a single place.
Yes, it would help, even more when the term ?OpenSolaris? is used indiscriminately to talk about the project or the distro. The nVidia drivers (a very good example indeed) are not part of the project, and yet they're part of the distro. So when somebody says ?the nVidia drivers are part of OpenSolaris?, it can be either completely true or completely untrue depending on what the reader thinks ?OpenSolaris? is. Such confusion doesn't help. > By participating in the community. Jason King, as a community member, > volunteered to replace the SPARC disassembler. John Sonnenschein, as a > community member, volunteered to help replace parts of libc. > > There is a list of exactly which components are closed and members of > the community can volunteer to replace them in almost every case. nVidia? Flash? Acrobat reader? (yes, not here yet, but I bet it will get in OpenSolaris as soon as it ships). Those are what matter for most people. SPARC assembler and those ce NICs, well, some people need them, but honestly, you won't get a headline out of those. > Right, but Ubuntu and many other distributions do the same thing. Do they? The opposite was said on the thread, and I have to admit, Ubuntu doesn't seem to support their use very much: ?Ubuntu works best with drivers that are themselves under the same license as GNU/Linux, the GPLv2.? http://www.ubuntu.com/partners/hardwareprogramme/freesoftware They ease up the installation of proprietary drivers, but they certainly do not install them by default as OpenSolaris the distribution does: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto And I remember that even them were criticized for doing that in the past. Actually, I haven't seen distro installing non-free software out-of-the-box in a long time, but I'm not much into Linux distros. > It's the same thing every other GNU/Linux distribution has to contend > with. I personally don't feel like its an issue worth addressing. They have an established base much larger than ours. They're not anymore in the starting blocks. We, on the other hand, should ensure that adoption isn't slowed by such discussions. > If someone wants to create a "Gnewsense" -like distribution for > OpenSolaris, more power to them. Of course. I'm sure that when the OpenSolaris distribution code is consolidated, it will promote that solution. > However, I'm more interested in providing a great experience than > licensing quibbles. I completely agree. A unique point of reference for those licensing things, as you suggested, would certainly help to solve those quibbles. Laurent -- / Leader de Projet & Communaut? | I'm working, but not speaking for \ G11N http://fr.opensolaris.org | Bull Services http://www.bull.com / FOSUG http://guses.org |
