[geeks] Open Solaris, while I've been asleep.

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2010, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

> Well, sort of. According to the wikipedia page, it is currently based
> upon Solaris, but will move to something else, Illumos.

Illumos aims to fill in the gaps around Sun's CDDL code releases.
OpenSolaris has always included a blob of closed code (Motif, drivers for
various devices, etc.).  Illumos have the very high-aiming goal of
replacing all that with CDDL/GPL code so that there will be a runnable
system consisting only of CDDL/GPL code.

> From my understanding it's basicly fixed in time as Solaris is
> concerned, and will move forward in a similar, but not the same
> direction.

Well, yes, the parts of the code from Sun are fixed and will move forward
when Sun cuts a new release.  The amount of effort it'll take to keep this
thing sane is monumental.  I don't have the faith that they'll be able to
pull it off, seeing as how Oracle really have no incentive to keep the
OS/Net distribution internally consistent from release to release.

If I were these people, I'd spend my effort porting the concepts that make
Solaris great to another OS (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or Linux), but I'm not, so
I wish them the best of luck in their uphill battle.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke |
Elgin, TX         | "He who is contented is rich." -- Lao Tzu
USA               |