>>>>> "es" == Ed Saipetch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
es> Sun's approach to opensourcing projects
AIUI, only the development branch is open-sourced. The stable
branches remain proprietary: no source for sol10u<n>, and no stable
branch for opensolaris ips. sol10u<n> is free-as-in-free-beer for
now, but you cannot make one small change and rebuild it, nor can you
duplicate the DVD and give it to others. Sun loves to explain their
release strategy, but the explanation is always so careful I wind up
more confused after I've heard it than before.
Nothing stops another distribution like Nexenta to make their own
hopefully-more-stable branch from the unstable solaris source, but
copyright ownership will prevent the competing community member from
taking their branch proprietary as Sun can do with theirs. Sun is
selling their patch maintenance in a CentOS-ification-proof way.
Fewer people than usual seem to care among ZFS users because the
stable branch isn't stable, but if it were it'd suck to be stuck
choosing between freedom and a stable release.
then, CDDL is intentionally GPL-incompatible which makes a fork of the
unstable trunk less likely.
Also it is a hybrid closed/open thing. They have stated ``all new
components added to Solaris will be open-source,'' but this doesn't
include new drivers. There are lots of proprietary 3rd party drivers,
as there are with Linux, but unlike Linux many of the inbuilt drivers
for hardware Sun sells are proprietary. ``All new components'' seems
to mean their intent is for anything on which their marketing
spotlight falls to beat an open-source drum---the promise has fallen
rather flat for cut-off dates or product boundaries compared to
something like Ubuntu.
Unlike most Linuxes the compiling of bundled 'sfw' freeware into SYSV
packages is a manual process, and there've been reports that the
source package sometimes doesn't match the binary package or simply
doesn't build. Remember ``including all build scripts'' from the GPL?
if your source doesn't build, make sure you build it by hand so you
can try to claim the recipient jsut doesn't have enough skill to type
the right incantations. This is another way to become the main source
for stable releases---you can't add a huge subsystem to Samba this way
because you'll get caught, but you can let a few bug fixes and build
tricks slip through the cracks, gaining the advantage while still
appearing in good faith.
And they've done things that look legal to me but very questionable
from a software freedom advocate's standpoint, like their franken-gcc
which, unlike free-as-in-freedom gcc, makes SPARC executables of
reasonable performance (good!) by combining gcc's front-end with Forte
proprietary back-end (upsetting.).
From a user who cares about software freedom's standpoint, it's much,
*much* better than Mac OS X, but meaningfully worse than Linux on
several fronts. It's hard to tell what's strategic from what's just
unfortunate. So far publicity seems to be one of the successful
prongs of the strategy---virtually all the Sun criticism you'll read
is inane stock market punditry, business-porn, predictions threats
unsolicited-advice---that sort of nonsense. Criticism on the software
freedom front is minimal or hazily-informed from what I've seen.
Critics keep saying ``let's wait and see'' for the last three years
but refuse to actually see anything and talk about it.
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