The OpenSolaris Developer Preview

The license mismatch is clearly a problem.  Although as long as the GPL distributables are
available from Sun separately (and I believe they all are, right?) then a reasonable
interpretation is that the "OBL" applies only to the non-GPL components and that the GPL
applies normally.

This seems like more of a accounting error (putting the license in the wrong place) than a
license violation.

(you didn't think I'd talk about the actual OS, did you? I've got to see if it runs on any of
my hardware before I can do that...)

What a pointless flamewar. Half of it is more like an unstructured game of Nomic than a
flamewar, actually, arguing about the methods one should use in order to begin the process of
determining whether or not an OpenSolaris distro should be allowed to be called `OpenSolaris'
and whether it is a Sun or a community project. In the middle of that Brian Gupta spends some
time tossing around conspiracy theories about Ian Murdock's malign intent to destroy
OpenSolaris by, um, releasing a distro called 'OpenSolaris'. Truly earth-stilling stuff.


Joerg's having a whole bundle of fun in there, of course, whipping up the flames: Indiana will
fail because nobody cooperated with *his* distribution; Indiana hackers must prove a totally
insignificant negative (that naming Indiana `OpenSolaris' will not harm other distros in any
way); Indiana will fail because some of Joerg's suggestions are not accepted without demurral;
Schillix is the One True OpenSolaris; Sun didn't help with SchilliX out of pique (Joerg is
apparently not helping with Indiana because they don't agree to use only his build system and
drop all others)...

As usual he's got the occasional reasonable point in there, but it's surrounded with so much
incredibly undiplomatic complaining that only a saint would plough through it to answer those
points.

It's odd how Joerg is trying to simultaneously piss off the Linux developer community by
appearing to be a raging Solaris fanboy incapable of working with anyone else, *and* to piss
off the OpenSolaris developer community by doing exactly the same thing. I'd have thought that
if there were one group he *could* get on with, it would be Sun, but no, the same old debating
tactics (argument by assertion, argument by reiteration, conspiracy theories, et seq) we're so
wearily familiar with get used against Sun as well.

 -- N., finding this a fascinating study of abnormal mass psychology, almost as good as
debian-devel

By sheerest coincidence, Sam Hocevar, Debian project leader, e-mailed the Nexenta folks today
to suggest new improved cooperation between Debian and Nexenta.

I love this chaotic ecosystem.  No matter how many bad moves Sun can make, they have formed a
live bidirectional conduit into the ecosystem by releasing Solaris under a Free Software
licence.

I'm excited about the future!

Regards,

Zooko

I'm writing this comment from a machine running the OpenSolaris LiveCD.

bash-3.2$ uname -a
SunOS opensolaris 5.11 snv_75 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris

The machine is an AMD Athlon64 3000 with an MSI motherboard that has built-in Nvidia graphics
and networking. The built-in audio is an AC97 RealTek chip (I think).

Amazingly, everything works with no hassle. Networking was auto-configured, Xorg runs, Gnome
looks normal, sound is working. I am very impressed with the quality of this LiveCD, for being
a beta-quality release.

There are some differences between the names of commands used in GNU and those used in
OpenSolaris. For example, there is no top(1) command but Solaris provides a prstat(1) command
that does the same thing. Instead of lsmod(1) there is modinfo(1M).

It's free! Try it!