Comments on: Is OpenSolaris “Going Nowhere?”

By: JWD

JWD — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:56:15 +0000

"I would also like to see Simon or Sun back up the assertion that Sun is “the single largest contributor” to code on an “average” Linux disk."

I'm not Simon or Sun but this study shows that Sun is by far the biggest corporate contributor to Debian. Those numbers don't seem to include OO.o

By: Patrick Georgi

Patrick Georgi — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:30:38 +0000

Of course Solaris is a distraction to any “mission” surrounding Linux – it’s its own system, after all, and a rather good one, at that. Sun also used to have a very strict policy on certain issues where Linux is lacking (to choose the nice word), eg. API and ABI stability, or justification of development (you get grilled on why you want to replace an interface with another one, it doesn’t seem to be that way for Linux (the platform, not the kernel), where new components replace old ones every 3 months). That seems to change however.

As for licensing, the CDDL is a quite good license, and well balanced – the “play with noone (but rob the weaker)” ideal of the GPL is getting in the way every now and then, see the problems it has when you try to combine it with CDDL code, for an example.

What Sun really has to learn is to let go, and give away control – that’s the Achilles heel of OpenSolaris right now, and it’s hard for third parties to grab it (so Sun would have to learn the hard way, similar to gcc and egcs) because of the sheer manpower behind the Sun branch of the project. That last aspect is probably true for every once-closed-now-open project by a large company (that isn’t effectively abandonware, that is)

By: Kennon

Kennon — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:38:45 +0000

I think you hit the nail on the head about Sun Zonker…but much of the same can be said about Novell. Novell has a software catalog that could forklift replace Microsoft in an IT environment and yet it chooses not to GPL most of it. I seriously believe that if Novell opened some of it’s products like GroupWise and eDirectory and gave them to the Linux community it would be a major turning point in Linux adoption. In a couple years we won’t talk about this option anymore because there will be mature and full featured GPL based messaging and directory systems in the Linux community…and they won’t be Novell products. I spoke with Ron about this at Gwavacon this year and I think more people need to do the same because although SUSE is the best enterprise class distro on the market today, it probably won’t always be and Novell has so much more to offer than YAD (Yet Another Distro).

By: Bligh

Bligh — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:18 +0000

I’ll bet that your next post will be “Microsoft ‘Going Nowhere’?” or “Novell, How to give moral lessons when we have none”. Attacking the ones that contribute to open source and free software while making deals, support and act as one with those that whose only want to harm open source and free software. Right. Check. Thank you for your lesson.

By: Francis

Francis — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:43:36 +0000

> I don’t know where Novell stands in contributions to Linux overall

An of course incomplete but decent list of some of these at: http://en.opensuse.org/Novell_Supported_Projects