On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 3:28 PM, Sandip Bhattacharya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> +++ Angad Singh [18/06/08 12:17 +0530]: > >Belenix is a LiveCD distribution of OpenSolaris created by the indian > >opensolaris community - bangalore opensolaris user group (BOSUG). > > > Angad, > > What is the current licensing state of Opensolaris? Is it entirely open > sourced? > > This is from Wikipedia(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris): > > The opening of the Solaris source code has been an incremental > process. > The first part of the Solaris codebase to be open sourced was the > Solaris Dynamic Tracing facility (commonly known as DTrace), a > tracing > tool for administrators and developers that aids in tuning a system > for > optimum performance and utilisation. DTrace was released on January > 25, > 2005. At that time, Sun also released the first phase of the > opensolaris.org web site, announced that the OpenSolaris code base > would > be released under the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution > License), and announced the intent to form a Community Advisory > Board > (CAB). The opening day launch, in which the bulk of the Solaris > system > code was released, was June 14, 2005. There remains some system code > that is not open sourced, and is available only as binary files. The > OpenSolaris source code represents the code in the most recent > development build of Solaris. > > Is part of the distribution still just binary? Any roadmap when it is > going to be completely open sourced? OpenSolaris 2008.05 is 99% opensource except for a few drivers and userland tools. In all these cases the code is derived from third party sources and Sun does not own the rights to open these up. These will eventually be replaced with open cleanroom implementations. These are all legally re-distributable binaries. To bootstrap an OpenSolaris based distro, one needs some closed binaries. It is a 7mb download. It was a much bigger download earlier, but over a period of time this has reduced and the goal is to remove them altogether. These are free as in beer as of now. If there are people interested in making this happen they may join the emancipation project. It is currently being worked on by John Sonnenschein OR they may also work with the BeleniX team, the list of closed binaries are clearly identified and specified as a project idea in the BeleniX page (see: http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=projects - Replace closed source commands) Bulk of the kernel is available under CDDL. Many other open source softwares are under their individual licenses. As far as Belenix is concerned, the tooling to build belenix from scratch and specs to build all the softwares that it provides is available at sourceforge (see: http://sourceforge.net/projects/belenix) Also am curious about this part from your FAQ: > http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/faq/general_faq/#whatis > > Below are key OpenSolaris-related technologies: > > OpenSolaris Source Code: This is the source base for open > development. It consists of several components called > consolidations. > See the downloads page for the technologies released and the > roadmap for > future releases. At present, the OpenSolaris source base is not > enough > to bootstrap an entire system, so developers start by downloading > an > OpenSolaris distribution and installing the OpenSolaris bits on > top. > > It seems that even man pages of OpenSolaris are not available for > redistribution yet. > > > http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Belenix_FAQ#Where_are_the_Man_Pages_.3F > The belenix FAQ hasn't had a end-to-end review for some time now and needs an update. People have only done minor edits on & off. The man pages were open sourced in 4 installments and are available since September 2007 (check manpage consolidation at opensolaris.org). But BeleniX still doesn't include it to make space for bundling lot more softwares. It was planned to be included in 0.7 but was dropped in favour of additional softwares. (source: belenix team) If anyone cares about making the last remaining bits free as in speech, the Belenix team would be glad to have them part of their team. The size of the BeleniX team can be currently counted on the fingers of a hand. They need people who can be part of their team and help continue to make a smashing opensolaris based distro. Given these constraints how does OpenSolaris/Belenix qualify to be > called a "Free" unix distribution? Please note that I am not in any way > belittling the contribution of the Belenix team. I admire their > contribution to develop community based software. My questions are > directed only at the OpenSolaris project. > It is a herculean task both in terms of money and effort required to open up a software ecosystem of the scale of Solaris. Sun spent a few millions and 2 years of initial effort just to get the initial open-sourcing done 3 years back. Over the last 3 years a lot more stuff has been opened and the process is still on. 3000 man pages have already been opened up and more are coming one by one. The effort needed to do all these is huge so time and resourcing both determine how fast these happen. In fact each and every piece of software in SUN is being thrown open. For e.g.. last year portions of the SUN Cluster product were opened up and this year the entire stuff has been open-sourced as the OPAC project . The above FAQ is out of date and needs to be changed. OpenSolaris 2008.05 is self-hosting and even BeleniX for that matter after we test it further and iron out the kinks. The OpenSolaris source bundle will give rise to a complete build from which the kernel can boot. The complete userland boot requires other "opensource" software like libxml, openssl etc. The only closed bits are the few drivers and userland tools alluded to earlier. This can be said for sure since Moinak Gosh, architect of Belenix has been building BeleniX from OpenSolaris source and has found it boots, installs and works fine. Most linux zealots tend to say "if it's not GPL, it's not free"... and in that case, arguing with you is impossible. It's CDDL and will remain so for the years to come, AFAIK. As far as ZFS is concerned, Jeff Bonwick, the creator of ZFS posted 3 photos ( http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/Casablanca) of him sitting and chatting with Linus Torvalds and it was titled 'Casablanca, so we are led to speculate that ZFS is going to be coming to Linux soon ( http://www.osnews.com/story/19757/ZFS-Coming-to-Linux/). It has not been possible till now because of the incompatibility between CDDL and GPL licenses where opensolaris and linux codebase differ. FreeBSD and MacOSX already have ZFS. That's all I really know. OpenSolaris is not GPL. It is open source. The reference in terms of saying what is open source or not is The Open Source Initiative (OSI) ( http://www.opensource.org/). They have defined a set of 10 criteria ( http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd) which a license has to satisfy if it is to be considered open source. In order to simplify the choice for users / developers / administrators, they even go as far as evaluating existing licenses and listing the ones they have approved as being open source ( http://www.opensource.org/licenses) because they satisfy the 10 criteria. OpenSolaris is published under the CDDL which is one of the OSI approved open source licenses, yes, just as GPL, BSD, Apache, MIT and several others. This means that OpenSolaris is open source as defined by OSI. Considering Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distro's (and one of my personal favs), the way they make such a very nice open source distro is that they bundle a bunch of open source stuff and a few bits of redistributable proprietary things (like drivers for fancy NVIDIA cards). The OpenSolaris community does the same with Open Solaris. It's "topologically" equivalent to Ubuntu in that respect. In fact, if you take your average Linux distro with GNOME, and compare it to an OpenSolaris distro with GNOME, you really get the same thing except for a few differences. Same : GRUB, X.org (half of the code in there is from Sun - the rest is HP, SGI, MIT and a few others) GNOME (and all the GNOME things - Ekiga, GTKam), OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird... all the things you experience as a user. GNU command line utilities (BASH, gtar, vim...). Binary redistributable proprietary apps/drivers (NVIDIA, FLASH player). Different : Kernel (Solaris kernel vs Linux kernel - both licensed under an OSI license). Pure UNIX system libraries and command line utilities (licensed under open source licenses). JDK6 (Linux will offer to install JDK 6 or ship with OpenJDK6 depending on the distro). On the other hand, if you look at the technology, the latest bits (namely Project Indiana aka OpenSolaris 2008.05) do have a lot of interesting stuff in there like IPS, ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, SMF, Xen, and a LiveCD to get you going quick. The desktop is pretty much a copy of Ubuntu if you ask me, though that doesn't matter, as I just care for the technology beneath it. I hope this helps position OpenSolaris being in the open source space for Linux fans of this list. You're going to find better explanations elsewhere but this is my understanding and knowledge and a bit I could collect from a few old opensolaris geeks out there. I do not want to portray the 'us against them attitude' as someone on this list eloquently quoted. I am not replying to this mail as a representative of the OpenSolaris community nor as an temporary employee of Sun and just expressing my views and the little that I know and have come to know about OpenSolaris. On an honest note, I'm still quite a newbie to it, but have made the effort to collect some facts to stand up to my claim. I also do not want to start a flamewar (though this whole topic is flaimbait) and would encourage people to give objective arguments in support of whatever they say. Having said that, I'd add that I am just a sun campus ambassador and a newbie solaris fan and I rather not pretend to be more. Angad Singh http://angadsingh.in http://blogs.sun.com/angad "The best way to predict future is to invent it" _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
