Debian doesn't exist to provide a commercial operating system. Debian has only one purpose, to provide a fully free operating system, which is why no other GNU/Linux distribution has such a strong relationship with the FSF or the GNU project. Complaining that Debian does waht it is their mission to do is as silly as complaining that IBM makes and sells coputer hardware or software, it is the purpose of the organization.
There was community interest WELL before IBM became involved and there still remains an almost complete (fully free, community-based) port to the System/370. It is likely that without the strong pressure from organizations like Debian to get things made Free IBM would not have had much incentive to do it. I rather suspect there is a chicken and egg problem at Sun. They don't believe that going with a GPL-compatible license would benefit them because they havn't seen what it would do. And the open source community at large won't come to the table on OpenSolaris until Sun rectifies this. All in all I am seeing that people generally share my frustration: If Solaris were Free we'd all love to work on it which, combined with proper support (from Sun or IBM or whoever ends up with it,) would probably propel it to the top. Of course the BSD family of operating systems boasts much of the same functionality and stability as Solaris (including dtrace, and those NetBSD people are also responsible for almost every entry on the list of GCC supported architectures) but lacks any major players in the support market, so it is pretty evident how important support is. But nobody is gonna walk away from all the existing and very lucrative Solaris support contracts so that's not going anywhere. I think licensing is going to become an increasingly important factor. Erik Johnson On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Adam Thornton <athorn...@sinenomine.net> wrote: > On Mar 25, 2009, at 2:43 PM, Mark Post wrote: > >> >> Why? Almost every Linux distribution has made exceptions to their >> own rules. Just look at Java. Up until recently, it was not open >> source, but it gets included anyway. As far as Slack/390 goes, that >> was my project, and although I didn't like the situation at the >> time, I wasn't going to have a philosophical meltdown over it. If it >> hadn't been for the cooperation IBM received, the open source >> proponents inside of IBM would never have gotten the code released. >> Sometimes compromise and patience win in the end. It certainly did >> this time. > > "Almost." > > I find Debian's insistence on license purity admirable from one > standpoint, but irritating from several others. > > Adam > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or > visit > http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
