On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 10:02:41AM +0530, Moinak Ghosh wrote: > > This allowance is necessary because Solaris has a whole > bunch of third-party software that uses Solaris internal > APIs and code. These will become instantly illegal if > OpenSolaris were to use GPL.
Thanks for the clarification Moinak. This freedom is needed for other projects based on OpenSolaris to take off .. Hope you guys are following gnusolaris. This projecte started about six months ago. Objective being to have the best of both worlds. The abundance of GNU software running on top of the stability of the OpenSolaris kernel. http://gnusolaris.org The last month their alpha was released under the name of Nexenta OS, which to me appears a fork of Debian riding on top of OpenSolaris. Need to create some space in my box to try out such things. From what I read, they have a huge amount of Debian stuff ported already for the alpha release. With apt-get already functional along with associated utils (dpkg, dselect etc) things seem to be progressing at a good pace. Between last evening and today, 16 packages have been added to the list ! > > SUN does not own full rights to some of the code > in Solaris and thus cannot open-source it. Obviously > replacement code needs to be written for these stuff > so that those can be open-sourced. But that is the > long-term work. A few of these are required components. > So in the meantime to allow OpenSolaris distros to be > able to build a bootable environment, these restricted > components are distributed as binary-only components. These > are only a few eg - Math library, a couple of other > libs, a few commands, a few kernel modules. You can > look at the "O/N Binary-Only Components, English" at > http://www.genunix.org/mirror/index.html > Yup, this makes things clear. Thanks. > Some of it is actually a bit silly. Things like "od" (Octal > Dump) are closed source because they contain source code > derived from Microsoft's Xenix! Now how much effort does it > take to rewrite od ? Probably the community can help out > with this. Why not rm -rf xenix_od ? The GNU od is pretty good. This used to be a portion of textutils before. Presently, textutils, fileutils and shellutils have been clubbed together under a single package 'coreutils'. It may not be 'od' per se which is the issue, but the other stuff of coreutils are used by virtually every script. Just accepting GNU coreutils would get rid of any xenix related problems for a lot of crucial stuff. > > Are crucial things like kernel, essential C libs, ZFS, > > dtrace and other 'goodies' affected ? > > > Nope. The kernel, libc, and all the Solaris 10 new features, > are open-source. I guess 90% of the core Solaris source-base > in open-source and more are being added. This sure is encouraging to hear ... > BTW I am not using the closed-source math library in > BeleniX. I am using FreeBSD's math library, which I have > modified and enhanced. FreeBSD's Math library was in fact > donated by SUN back in 1993! Thanks for this info ... I was under the impression that the core libs used in the *BSD collection was an original BSD port ... never knew the Solaris connection ! Keep on feeding us this sort of stuff, would clear a lot of misconceptions ... And keep up the good work, all you loonies on belenix. Bish
