On 3/25/09 4:26 PM, "Erik N Johnson" <[email protected]> wrote: > There was community interest WELL before IBM became involved and there > still remains an almost complete (fully free, community-based) port to > the System/370.
Thank you. It's nice to see that someone still remembers our early work and hasn't swallowed the corporate revisionism. > I rather suspect there is a chicken and > egg problem at Sun. They don't believe that going with a > GPL-compatible license would benefit them because they havn't seen > what it would do. And the open source community at large won't come > to the table on OpenSolaris until Sun rectifies this. I think it has more to do with a sense of survival. IBM often suffers this problem too -- any change to the status quo where revenue on OS or hardware is concerned -- is automatically a critical situation. Talk to any of the z/OS planners if you want to see a live example of someone who gets really paranoid when you start talking about other systems on System z, or insist that System z is NOT equal to z/OS. You can easily explain Sun's behavior by that model: if Sun loses control, then they can no longer supply guarantees of reliability, and they risk possible revenue loss and collapse of market share, eventually leading to corporate suicide. When you're losing tens of millions a quarter, that starts to be a very real fear. > All in all I am seeing that people generally share my frustration: If > Solaris were Free we'd all love to work on it Binary-only licenses ARE free with hardware. Ditto OpenSolaris for Intel. And OpenSolaris for Z. But you meen Free as in GPL sense of free. > Of course the BSD family of operating > systems boasts much of the same functionality and stability as Solaris But then you're back to ISV support. Sun spent a lot of money getting that problem solved. > I think licensing is going to become an increasingly important factor. I'm more concerned about anti-trust. If the IBM/Sun merger is blocked on anti-trust grounds, and Sun cannot locate another angel investor, my analysis would indicate that they're not long for this world. I don't believe HP has sufficient free cash to buy Sun (and would face the same anti-trust problems), and HP's history with strategic acquisitions is disastrous (the DEC/Compaq merger almost destroyed the company as a whole). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
