You (jay krik) wrote: > I was under the impression Open Solaris was the free version of Solaris. The > one where the community helps develop future releases of Solaris, and Solaris > was the commercial product that cost money to obtain. > Just went to the website and it says I can have Solaris 10 free? > So if I'm not a developer or programmer and don't want to be, Maybe I and > others like me should get Solaris 10 a finished product.behind the completed?? > Official release of Open Solaris is at version 2009.06 with 2010.03 on > doorstep. > So why is the open version > But will it have native support for all the drivers needed for the majority > of factory built laptops? > Guess we will find out! I am going to download it and install it today.
That's a common misunderstanding... ;-) Once there was Solaris. Then, at some time ~5 years ago Sun decided to Open Source it for a couple of reasons (I will not go into details here!). So there was a "fork" in the actual source tree of that time, which was modified in order to achieve Open Source Status (all copyrighted and can-not-be-made-open-source removed or replaced by an open source alternative). That's what you can find on http://OpenSolaris.ORG That then was USED to create a BINARY DISTRIBUTION, called OpenSolaris 20??.??(see: http://OpenSolaris.COM) (we've had a couple of those already!). There are other Distributions also derived from the Open Source Project, like Nexenta, Belenix, Schillix, etc... You can find those on http://opensolaris.org or http://genunix.org These BINARY DISTRIBUTIONS do contain ADDITIONAL things, that might NOT be available in the source on opensolaris.org. Still, at Sun/Oracle, the source is in one place, so all actual developments take place on opensolaris.org. In order to add those new features into the current commercial offering (still called Solaris 10), there then needs to be a BACK-PORT into the source-tree version used to build Solaris 10. That's also the reason, why SOME of the things currently available in OpenSoalris.COM or OpenSolaris.ORG are never going to be backported into Solaris 10! Still, they might show up in a future Version of Solaris. As OpenSolaris.ORG "only" holds the source code to the main stuff, there is NO COMMERCIAL offering DIRECTLY off of this code. So, from there, there then are commercial offerings for the diverse BINARY DITRIBUTIONS and the organizations offering these distributions. So far, you can at least to some degree compare it with "Red Hat" <-> "Fedora"... So, also at some time ago, Sun decided to allow a FREE (no money!) usage of Solaris 10. That's what you can see currently. Still, you need to obtain a LICENSE (you get it, when downloading it, because you AGREE to some-such license). No difference with the OpenSolaris.COM offering, there you also agree to a license. Same with the SourceCode on opensolaris.org, there also is a license... So, yes, you can use Solaris 10 also WITHOUT PAYING, but it's not free. It's free as in "free beer", meaning: No need to PAY FOR the license... Still, check the license... As there is one... And it's different with the diverse binary distributions... Hope, this clarifies a bit... Matthias -- Matthias Pfützner | Tel.: +49 700 PFUETZNER | Wer heute geboren wird, Lichtenbergstr.73 | mailto:matth...@pfuetzner.de | hat quantitativ weniger D-64289 Darmstadt | AIM: pfuetz, ICQ: 300967487 | Zukunft als wir. Edgar Germany | http://www.pfuetzner.de/matthias/ | Reitz, Die Zeit 12/97 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
