It’s official: Solaris is now open source.
Wow. I never thought I’d be typing those words. Congrats to all the folks at Sun. I can only imagine how much work it was to pull this off with a codebase of that size and complex lineage (Jim Grisanzio gives a peek behind the scenes in his weblog). I’m downloading the Solaris Express Community Release now, which, according to the release notes, you have to install before doing anything else.
Speaking of the release notes, reading them takes me back to Linux circa 1993—you know, back before package systems and graphical installers and all that. This is gonna be fun, though my idea of fun isn’t exactly mainstream. Sun has a lot of work to do to polish up the installation experience before this is ready for prime time, but simply getting all the code out there in buildable form is a great first step.
Hmm.. Say, maybe someone out in the community will build an OpenSolaris distro that’s nicely packaged?
It’s still not clear to me — or to the debian-legal folks who replied to my query — how truly open source they are. My hypothetical is this: let’s say I wanted to incorporate DTrace into Linux. Could I, without fear of legal sanction? That’s the only sense of “open source” that matters, isn’t it?
Our beloved Jörg Schilling (of cdrecord and piss-of-Linux-hackers fame) is working on SchilliX and talks about it in his blog at http://schily.blogspot.com/
Whether that one is really ‘nicely packaged’ remains to be seen.
Michael
What about Debian/GNU-OpenSolaris? *duck*
Lukas, you mean non-GNU/Linux ports like Debian GNU/NetBSD and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD ?
Or third party port to open sourced like GNU/Darwin or, ahem, GNU/Microsoft?
It would lovely to have a Debian/GNU-OpenSolaris port!
no, you cannot integrate DTrace into the linux kernel.
“pure” GPL code is not commpatible with nonGPL code. dont like that? use a license for your kernel code that doesnt mandate everyone else use the same license. ie :use a truely “free” license, not a captive license like GPL. ha ha.