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Open Source Wall Street for December 6
The Decatur
Jones Open Source Wall Street newsletter for December 6 (PDF) is
available, with looks at SCO, Red Hat, Novell, Mandrakesoft, Sun, and more.
"We believe that SUNW had little choice other than to make its
license incompatible with the GPL, otherwise the best parts of Solaris
would have simply been usurped and added to Linux. Thus we are skeptical
that a robust development community will form around SUNW's code, thereby
defeating the benefits of Open Source. As we have stated in the past, we
believe that SUNW is wasting critical resources by competing with broadly
supported, and rapidly evolving, Open Source projects versus taking a more
agnostic approach that caters to customer's desires."
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Open Source Wall Street for December 6 Posted Dec 8, 2004 17:13 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] "We believe that SUNW had little choice other than to make its license incompatible with the GPL, otherwise the best parts of Solaris would have simply been usurped and added to Linux."
Hmm. That is not that simple, because it could work both way: if Solaris is
So it will be a race between Solaris and Linux to merge the more
That is theory anyway. I myself doubt such merging will occur to
Open Source Wall Street for December 6 Posted Dec 8, 2004 18:09 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] It seems to me that people tend to forget that transferring code from one project to another is actually extremely difficult. Decatur Jones should think that the GPL-compatibility of licenses would mean that Gnome would usurp the best parts of KDE and MySQL would usurp the best parts of Postgres, which has obviously not happened (without asking which is better between the projects, it is safe to say that the best part of each project is better than the corresponding part of the other project). Furthermore, it took several years of concerted effort by SGI developers to add a relatively isolated part of Irix (XFS) to Linux.
Regardless of the licensing issues, there are fundamental differences in design between Solaris and Linux, and taking any substantial amount of code (as opposed to copying ideas and techniques, for which copyright licenses are irrelevant) from the other project would require changes in what each project sees as its advantage over the other.
The benefit to Sun of making Solaris open source is simply that their customers don't have to worry so much about Solaris being orphaned. This is, obviously a serious concern; if you're thinking of buying a Sun server today, your only supported option for operating system is one that analysts say should be taken out of active development by the owner. Open sourcing Solaris is a good way of mitigating this risk for customers, even if it leads only to in-house bugfixes in 10 years and no substantial advances.
Open Source Wall Street for December 6 Posted Dec 8, 2004 23:01 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] The benefit to Sun of making Solaris open source is simply that their customers don't have to worry so much about Solaris being orphaned.For this to be true, Sun would have to release complete source code and toolchain for Solaris. It seems it is not happening: one of the purposes of the license is to have the capacity of mixing free with proprietary code. We will have to wait to know which parts are released as source code. Having code for 95% of Solaris will not help rebuilding the operating system, though it should be enough to recompile individual programs.
Open Source Wall Street for December 6 Posted Dec 9, 2004 17:17 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] What are your sources that Sun will not release a toolchain that allows to build Solaris from source?
My information, that I got from Sun engineers who are in direct contact with the release-preparing group, says they'll release one.
Open Source Wall Street for December 6 Posted Dec 9, 2004 18:13 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] What are your sources that Sun will not release a toolchain that allows to build Solaris from source?Notice that I said "complete source and toolchain". The source is this article from eweek. There, Linus Torvalds says: The decision not to open-source everything in the license was likely the result of a combination of issues, Torvalds said. It's "partly Sun wanting to maintain control, and partly ... Sun not being even legally able to release those parts of Solaris that they don't have full ownership on."IMHO it would be no good if Sun released some toned-down version, like Apple did with Darwin. Even worse for the purpose of long term maintenance would be if vital parts are missing. Unless you can share more inside information, we will have to wait and see what they release.
Open Source Wall Street for December 6 Posted Dec 10, 2004 10:38 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] I know that there are problems in releasing source parts where copyrights don't belong to Sun. We will have to wait to see which parts these are. The Sun folks tell me that these won't be relevant parts. I have reasons to trust them; and I have reasons to believe their information more than an eWeek article.
Yes, Sun wants to maintain control over their software. They will allow forks, for those who do not want to play with them. Where's that different from MySQL, from ASF, from Mozilla Foundation? How's that different from many other commercial products who have been open-sourced and couldn't do so completely? (Mozilla, anyone?)
Joachim
Btw, I'm not a Sun employee. I just happen to know people there. I use Suns since 1984 -- and use Linux sind 1992; I see myself impartial in these topics. There are some situations where I prefer Sun Solaris irons, and some where I'll go with Linux. There are some, where I go with AIX or Windows...
Open Source Wall Street for December 6 Posted Dec 9, 2004 16:35 UTC (Thu) by etwilson (guest, #8459) [Link] Yes, I have to agree with you. The idea that somehow the Linux developers could just rip bits and pieces out of Solaris and bolt them on to Linux is pretty silly. I don't think that the business types who wrote this have any idea how hard it is to adapt software components from one environment to another. Linux and Solaris have totally different software architectures and in general it would be simpler to write code from scratch than try to hack some part of Solaris into Linux.
You might as well say, "Sun can't release Solaris under a BSD licence for fear the Microsoft will usurp the best part for Windows Longhorn."
The practicality of copying from Solaris to Linux Posted Dec 10, 2004 17:51 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Not only is it hard to copy bits from one program to another, it's easy to create them from scratch. I see a lot of intellectual property wrangling over property which is trivial to create. Patents covering things any engineer could invent in a few days. Copyright issues over 100 lines of code. Where I work, we sometimes build prototypes of software products from code we get off the Internet. Though we probably have every legal right to distribute that code royalty-free, we don't. Before shipping, we replace every line of it with something we created from scratch. It's so cheap that it isn't even worth dealing with the legalities of distributing code someone else wrote. The great costs of developing software don't come from the coding. It's testing, packaging, marketing, and other things that are there even if you copy the code from someone else, or that can be reused free of copyright constraints.
Hardware compatibility Posted Dec 8, 2004 18:32 UTC (Wed) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848) [Link] A huge problem for Sun is the limited Hardware Compatibility List. Today this listed just 26 desktop/server systems and 6 laptops. Maybe other systems will work, but I for one won't bet the enterprise on it. Device drivers are always going to be problematic to port between different operating systems, but this is one area where Linux is the hands-down winner. Sun would have to devote massive resources to get to a similar level of support.
Open Source Wall Street for December 6 Posted Dec 9, 2004 9:56 UTC (Thu) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] Haven't read linked article yet, but it seems that ESR's words that Sun with its current management style is doomed are proving to be true.Let Java Go and Let Java Go, Round 2 At least not only ESR thinks that Sun's future is very bleak, if they will not manage to transform to something more competable.
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