On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 9:49 PM, W. Wayne Liauh <w...@hawaiilinux.us> wrote: >> While OpenSolaris is already open source (mostly), >> there were some plans within Sun to open source more >> technologies, but Sun didn't get to it because of the >> merger. In particular - Sun Studio, C++ compiler etc. >> Interesting what are Oracle intentions in regards to >> keeping those plans? > > I believe the main issue is not--in case the unthinkable happens--whether > Oracle will open source more technologies, but, as another poster mentioned, > will Oracle continue to license update/upgrade of the existing code under the > CDDL license. > > All of Sun's open-sourced code is under dual license, meaning that Oracle can > continue to develop Sun's technologies under a proprietary license, but > freeze the CDDL'd code at its current state. Of course, anyone can fork the > Solaris kernel under the CDDL scheme. But the possibility is zero.
Sun has already been doing that. If you pay for support and use the support repository, you are using a closed fork. Since OpenSolaris-dev and OpenSolaris-support are pretty close together temporally, this isn't a big deal. You can look at a snapshot of the snv_111 code and the list of fixes applied to get a pretty good idea of what the code looks like. After several years and potentially thousands of fixes, a lot of the benefit of the open source roots is lost. While the typical customer doesn't have an interest in modifying the code, many have an interest in looking at it to understand observed behavior or to aid in writing dtrace scripts that journey into fbt probes. As the years have passed since the fork between what became Solaris 10 and what became OpenSolaris, I have increasingly less confidence that looking at any version of OpenSolaris code will allow me to really understand what is happening on a Solaris 10 system. That is, as the number of fixes and features included in Solaris 10 increases, the value of the open source roots decreases. I have always expected that the same will happen with Solaris 10+1 (11g?). I have consistently asked Sun to make the code for supported OS's available to customers, even if it is under a license other than the CDDL. I encourage others to make similar requests. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
