> I didn't say there weren't significant changes since > 2.0 and the release of SVR4, but the article implies > that "significant changes" occurred to Solaris after > 1994 when he says Sun bought the SVR4 codebase. That > is not an accurate statement, given the timeline of > Solaris development and releases, and especially > since Solaris 2.0 came out with SVR4. Solaris 2.0 > came out before 1994.
Solaris 2.0 release AFAIK had nothing to do with Sun buying the full rights to the SVR4 code. Those were indeed separate events. SVR4.0 was released in 1990 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVR4#SVR4 Solaris 2.0 came out in June 1992 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28operating_system%29#Version_history which added some features like a fully pre-emptible kernel, IIRC. and I _think_ (although I can't find anything as clear as that) that Sun bought out their royalty obligation in 1994, and bought full rights to the source (allowing them to re-license it as they wished) in 2003 (except some bits like the internationalization in libc). As of the end of 1994, Solaris was at 2.4, with quite a few features beyond vanilla SVR4.0. The source for OpenSolaris was released in 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris#History The review that started this thread was IMO not impressive. I don't want to beat on it too bad, because the review itself (as opposed to any background info the author tossed in) wasn't really _wrong_, and was more positive than not. But it was really shallow. One of the comments pointed out that flash was easy enough to get, if from a non-default repository rather than from a tarball. Now I suppose for a clueless desktop user, it's better if everything they're going to want magically works right after installing, without doing anything else. But getting flash and sound working clearly wasn't rocket science, as the review author managed ok. And the stuff he didn't even mention: DTrace, ZFS, SMF being just the big stuff that you won't find in a Linux distro. (DTrace and ZFS have of course spread to some of the *BSD based OS's, which aren't stuck with the limitations of GPL) So I'd rate the review as something that doesn't really hurt, but is also not something I'd point people to for accurate information. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
