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Newsletters - 10 TechJobs - 11 Slashdot Broadband 12 Search 13 X 14 Welcome to Slashdot 15 It's funny. Sections 23 Main 24 Apache 25 Apple 26 Askslashdot 27 Books 28 BSD 1 more 29 Developers 1 more 30 Games 10 more 31 Interviews 32 Science 2 more 33 YRO Help 34 FAQ 35 Bugs Stories 36 Old Stories 37 Old Polls 38 Topics 39 Hall of Fame 40 Submit Story 41 About 42 Supporters 43 Code 44 Awards Services 45 Broadband 46 Online Books 47 PriceGrabber 48 Product News 49 Tech Jobs Sun plans open source Solaris? Corporate quote reads: "Linux is good for Solaris, but Linux is not a corporate community". Problems exist with royalty and various agreements it's made, but is actively looking for issues that would prevent it going open source. Sun is already making various Solaris APIs compatible with Linux, and is working out how to market the initiative and what image it's looking at presenting. Change The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. Apache and ASP (Score:1) by 60 Gleef (86) on Tuesday January 12, @11:46AM ( 61 #2043001) ( 62 about:mozilla) doog wrote: What do you mean ASP modules exist for Apache? If I can't run SSJS on Linux, then I have to convince the suits to buy solaris AND netscapes server which will cost more than NT. Netscape's 64 FastTrack server runs server side Javascript on Linux. It costs only $295, which should be easier for your bosses to swallow. Unfortunately, I don't think it handles ASP, you would need to convert those pages into some other form (which is a good thing in the long run). Allbery (500) on Tuesday January 12, @12:55PM ( 66 #2043002) Ahem. However, members "must" return to the community fixes for "errors" in the code base. Seems like an arbitrary distinction to me, and one that adds weakness to this license. I understand that Sun wants to let users of Solaris function in a proprietary manner; Personally, I wouldn't be very happy with such a system. After how many years will we have the same old hunk of binary again? Yes, that's just my speculation, but it's the difference between buying nice Sun hardware to run an operating system I can't tinker and share with my friends and buying a nice Alpha where I can. In the recent past there have been two alternative approaches to software licensing: traditional proprietary licensing and Open Source licensing. Open Source licensing is relatively new, being preceded by shareware and free software. Shareware and freeware have little to do with free software, and are predated by it, but you already know that. They point out some advantages and disadvantages of each, with the comparisons fairly obviously coming from a large company. From a business's point of view, they're probably valid. Actually, there seems to be quite a bit of worrying over who own what--more corporate influence. On one hand, this is a step closer to free code, which is significant, especially coming from a large company (who isn't doing this as a last-ditch effort). It gives many of the benefits of free software, including source availability for paranoid admins and the ability to fix bugs on your own schedule, instead of waiting for the distributing company to get around to it. On the other hand, there's a lot more restriction in what can be done. Companies are free to make proprietary extensions and distribute them without the code (well, the BSD license allows that, too). Bug fixes must be contributed back to the parent organization (you effectively get this with the GPL, but it's not mandated). The source seems only to be available to members of the "community", the definition of which seems to be up to the originating company. The example given is for "Research Use" and implies that joining the community is at no cost to the developer, but another company implementing the same idea may charge for membership. I think it's a likely scenario in today's corporate environment. With this in mind there would be no need for Sun to make Linux versions of it's apps and it wouldn't need to port over any Linux apps either. PnP improvements and more modularized stuff ( less need to recompile ) are pretty obvious. That crack also means ( to me ) that he and the cour team aren't going to pay much attention to big iron for a while yet. This is a smart move since as of today Sun can put more 1st rate programers in it's source code and on 64 CPU boxes than we can. The "More Eyeballs" logic works against us on large scale SMP more than any other problem. This all sounds like maintaining both a true Solaris and a Linux/Solaris hybrid. It's then up to the marketing department ( at Sun ) to spin it so your head hurts. Things like "Smooth scaling from a $700 workgrupe web server all the way up to a 9 terabytes database workhorse" sounds like a nice line :). Opening up Solaris itself and hence any Sun brewed software is a major bonus. SGI is very competitive with Sun in scalability-sensitive benchmarks like TPC-D, and is building bigger single-system image boxes than anyone, bar none (several shipped 256p O2000s now). Solaris = Linux++ Look for it to happen within the next year - by then they will have announced Solaris 8. Although the 64 bit features and SMP features are compelling, Linux will completely dominate Solaris when intel's merced chip is released! The reason we like to use Javascript instead of perl or something else is because we have an application that runs on the client AND the server using the SAME code base. If I could port the ASP functionality to something that would run on Apache and still be able to run the Server side Javascript I would. Those of us using Solaris and find that it works just fine the way it is pray that this doesn't happen. Your company just needs an excuse to use M$, not a reason to use UNIX. Now along comes a Unix that no competitor owns and which has developers working on it at no cost to the proprietary vendors. The smart ones (which includes Sun first of all) will shift to Linux to keep costs down, to take advantage of the free development staff. They will add their unique contributions into the Linux tree, to hope that it becomes part of the Linux "standard" and their competitors have to adopt or perish. The proprietary Unices will only survive for high end boxes with special needs, ie, 1024 node SMP etc which they want to keep a lock on. But eventually the high end will shrink to such a small base that it too will be ported to Linux. It may not be GPL, but you have to look at it from Sun's side too. The Solaris kernel still surpasses Linux in key areas, like SMP. Because development happens behind closed doors and NDA's you're never garenteed that a new version won't come out right after you buy a product. If fact, you aren't even garenteed that a product won't die after you purchase it. Or even worse is when a company is planning to stop development of a product, but the consumer has no idea untill well after the product is purchased and in production. Such is life with non-open software - if you don't like it (like myself) start using OSS to begin with. Even DEC Alpha server 4100's don't allow you to hot swap/upgrade cpu's and ram. For that, I figure it's worth allowing Computerwire a plug - I received an e-mail from 128 Richard MacPherson, the West Coast Accounts manager of Computerwire, offering businesses a 10 day free trial of their various publications. SUN PLANS OPEN SOURCE SOLARIS Sun Microsystems Inc is working on a strategy that will enable it to move its Solaris Unix to the open source development model without stepping on the toes of the Linux community and being branded the evil empire. However, Solaris isn't as young as Java and Sun is not sure what the effect might be on its large code set and hefty installed base. It is looking for anything that could prevent it taking Solaris open source, such as rights that may belong to other companies. Sun, which is already making Solaris APIs compatible with Linux, says it is also still working out how it will market the initiative and what image it wants to present. It expects to move quickly but until there's a method "we can't say bombs away," it says. People who paid this then are go...
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