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Sun makes its moveSun makes its movePosted Feb 7, 2005 2:33 UTC (Mon) by mgerdts (guest, #27726)Parent article: Sun makes its move
I'm somewhat disappointed with your coverage of this topic. I feel like the Linux advodate reading MS drivel back in LWN's first days. FWIW, I started using Linux as my primary desktop OS a couple years before LWN started. I have learned quite a bit from Jonanthan's descriptions of the bits and bytes of the kernel.
First of all, let's be clear. No one has ever stated that Sun is only releasing the kernel. While this would be interesting, it would not be of a lot of value without seeing how userland interacts. In fact, looking at the number of files in the code released so far (dtrace) we see that there are 4.6 times more files and twice as many lines of userland code than kernel code released. Does this mean that when Sun releases the source code that there will be an version of Korn shell that has an OSI approved license that I could "port" to Linux? Oh, how many hours I have wasted on stupid incompatibilities between ksh and pdksh. What's your favorite Solaris userland tool that is missing or doesn't work right on Linux?
I am rather confused when I hear from people in the "open source" world when they say that open source Solaris will be of no use unless Sun manages to attract a large developer community. As I see it Sun already has a pretty decent open source developer community. When I look at the times that I have felt the need to "scratch an itch", most of the time it has been with an open source product on Solaris. The same bugs or missing features would have caused me pain had they been running on Linux. Key examples of this include adding dynamic length strings to PHP, fixing bugs and creating a winbind UID/GID plug-in mechanism on Samba, and writing tools from the ground up to manage a large and ever changing user population. As I see it, either through bundling with Solaris or end-user add-ons, open source code that I wrote runs on Solaris and pretty much every Linux distro in use today.
Which parts of the GNU toolchain do not work on Solaris the day they are relesed for Linux? How about Apache's various sub-projects? Samba? PHP? MySQL? Postgres? What else do you use your Linux server for? I'll be the first to concede that Sun's desktop has been pretty bad for a while. However, Solaris 10 with JDS 3 and Xorg's X server has served me every bit as well as Red Hat's offerings.
Am I glad that Sun intends to open up the rest of their code? Hell yes. I have had other nagging problems in the past that I have sometimes been able to fix for myself because I had access to Solaris source code. I have filed bug reports and RFE's with Sun to get these changes integrated. Sometimes it has worked as fast as open source works ("MIT krb5 causes libc to leave ghost wtmpx files", libc patch released in less than 3 weeks) and other times it has taken years ("pfiles | head can leave a process in a stopped state" took from pre Solaris 7 days to Solaris 9 beta). I look forward to having a place where the sysadmin at a university that has warranty (or no) support can get his patches into the codebase that has typically catered more towards those with $50,000 - $3,000,000 servers and support contracts that make the hardware look cheap.
Will Sun see people flocking from BSD or Linux to Solaris just because Solaris code is now available? Probably not. However, there are plenty in Sun's installed base that will make good use of the code. Those in Sun's installed base that don't use the code most likely have lack of talent or corporate IP fears that would prevent them from doing much with the code that comes with their Red Hat or SuSE support contracts (which also make the hardware look cheap).
As for license compatibility: userland tools should be able to come across just fine. Binaries using the CDDL should have no problems running on the typical Linux distro. Thinking that source code could be lifted from Solaris and brought to Linux (or vice-versa) is probably asking a bit much from the technical standpoint, even before thinking about lawyers. Sure there are some routines that it would be handy to just cut and paste, but why should this licensing incompatibility be so much worse than the rest of them out there?
Please feel free to cut Sun a little slack as you go back and take a look at what they have done for the open source world.
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/02/03/sun.nfs...
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