"Richard L. Hamilton" <[email protected]> wrote: > Solaris 2.0 release AFAIK had nothing to do with Sun buying the > full rights to the SVR4 code. Those were indeed separate events.
I received my first Solaris-2.0 together with a SparcStation-LX as some kind of Christmas gift from Sun in early January-1992. This was sooooo slooooow and this is why Solaris was called "Slowlaris" between 1992 and 1993. SunOS-5.0 did not have automatically loadable drivers and thus could be installed from tape (using a ~ 1MB RAM-disk on tape just hehind the monolitic kernel). BTW: Solaris-2.0 came with a free SunPro compiler as there was no GCC or other compiler for SVr4 yet. > 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 This may be the "official" release date... > which added some features like a fully pre-emptible kernel, IIRC. IIRC, a fully pre-emptible kernel was not in Solaris-2.0, but Solaris-2.0 did already include most of the new features that have been developed between 1987 (SunOS-4.0) and SunOS-4.1.3 (1990), SunOS-2.0 was more than SVR4 SunOS-5.1 introduced a fully dynamic kernel with a in kernel linker and dynamically autimactically loaded drivers. IIRC, this also introduced "/devices". AT&T/Novell later developed a different and completely incompatible method for loadable drivers and a different method for in kernel MT. > 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). Sun did pay the amount of money for 3 years of royalties and after that got the permission to sublicense Solaris in source and binary. From my understanding this was the main fact that allowed OpenSolaris. Sun Lawyers did however take some time to decide on whether this would allow to give it away for free. BTW: the internationalization part in libc in question is closed source from the "OpenGroup" and was mainly developed by IBM. Sun "only" has the permission to give away sources that are either from Sun, or from AT&T but not in case there is also code from other parties.... Jörg -- EMail:[email protected] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin [email protected] (uni) [email protected] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
