On 3/23/09 4:46 PM, "Erik N Johnson" <[email protected]> wrote:
> By the same token, although Sun will insist that Solaris is 'open > source' and will show the same types of development speed up that > people have so often cited Linux for, it's barely open source. I can certainly attest to this statement from personal experience. It is impossible to build a working OpenSolaris on any platform without some closed-source code, some of which (amusingly enough) is owned by IBM. There are other parts of OpenSolars which Sun does not distribute source code, but provides precompiled binaries, which clearly cannot be ported anywhere. In their defense, much of this is not technical in origin, but in licensing agreements. The reason there is no OpenSolaris for SPARC is that Sun is not permitted to distribute some of the closed-source pieces on any other platform than Intel. There are pieces where only they can be the distributor, and only in a commercial product. That's the main reason for Opensolaris distributions from Sun -- they can't legally distribute some things if they are not the actual distributor and they charge something for it. They have been trying rather diligently to clean up the mess around these issues, but basically the incentive to do the clean up necessary to make this open-source-clean is not something they are prioritizing if they're struggling to survive. I can't really argue with that, much as I would like them to get on with it so I can do more to help them. > But if you contribute your code to Sun or Apple, now they own it. If > you ever try to use it in anything but their product they can (and > WILL) sue you. They will make you regret ever downloading and viewing > their code, let alone contributing your own. Erik's first law of > F/OSS: A project with a Free license will have N volunteer developers, > where a non-Free 'open source' project will have M volunteer > developers where N >= 50 * M. Don't forget IP lawyers. This is very fertile ground for them. > I would tend to think that until somebody who gets it takes Sun over, > or Sun gets their heads out their butts, we won't see the 'benefits of > open source' coming to Open Solaris (or the newly 'open sourced' Sun > JDK, also a joke by comparison with truly Free software.) Here I would disagree. To some extent, the OpenSolaris for System z port has forced them to reconsider how the opensolaris project works. We actually *did* it, which I think they never actually expected, and we simply refused to do some of their standard practices that don't fit in the Z community. That has caused them to rethink what was needed to have a successful project and change some things about how projects participate and interact with the commercial Solaris developers. > So what do you listers think? Are the technical merits of Open > Solaris great enough that the half-assed open source release won't be > enough to stop them? Or perhaps the technical problems in the Linux > internals are great enough that the benefit of Free Software won't be > able to carry the day? Well, clearly I do think that Solaris has some things to offer. The question is one of maturity. Solaris has been through the process of transformation that Unix needed to be a reliable enterprise OS, and has come through pretty well. Linux is still passing through that process in terms of documentation, release management, interface stability, etc, etc. I am not saying that it won't get there, it's just that Sun had a lot of money at one point to throw at the problem, and did so. Linux can match that, but it's a matter of time. > Or is Linux going to leave Solaris in the dust? Maybe. But I wouldn't bet money on it until someone fixes the flaws in RPM and in other configuration management schemes in Linux, and we get a working dtrace analogue in Linux. Dtrace is just too cool to be without -- I hope that if IBM does buy Sun that they contribute the dtrace code to open-source. It'd save a lot of time. ZFS, too. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
