2009/3/23 Michal Bielicki <cypromis at opensolaris.org>: > > Am 23.03.2009 um 12:53 schrieb ????? ????????????: > > On 3/23/09, S h i v <shivakumar.gn at gmail.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:24 PM, Epps, Aaron <Epps.Aaron at mayo.edu> wrote: > > IMHO, I think this would be short-sighted and disastrous for Sun. IBM > > would kill anything that competes with it's current offerings, Solaris > > competes with AIX, FishWorks competes with their crappy rebranded NetApp > > Storage Systems, SPARC competes with their PowerPC arch, etc. I hope I'm > > wrong about this but I think Big Blue would kill off almost everything > > (except Java and MySQL) that we like about Sun. Thoughts? > > > One of the benefits of opensourcing is the life of technologies > > transcend that of organizations if the uptake for that technology is > > high enough ! > > A large part of Opensolaris still relies on closed source which is > controlled by Sun. If IBM takes over then can let Opensolairs "die" by > locking the closed parts away. > -- > > > And it wouldn't be the first time for them to do that.
As been mentioned before, participation in the emancipation project would help fix that, and would be a good thing regardless if the rumors are proven true or false. Probably the two key things are the ksh93-integration work (as it provides implementations for a number of the closed binaries), and the libc-i18n pieces (needed to build libc). IIRC (I haven't looked recently), the rest of closed/ is mostly drivers (many of which could be reimplemented from public specs) or plugins. While useful, those bits are probably less critical. One more interesting bit is the compilers. Are shadow builds also done on Sparc, or just x86? (I've never actually checked too closely -- most of time I work on x86, and by the time I build on sparc, it's to the point I just kick it off and come back when it's done). If not, that could be an issue.
