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Our Blogs Open Sauce OpenSolaris: nice try, pity about the licence | OpenSolaris: nice try, pity about the licence |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 27 May 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 It is worth recalling here that even before the Linux kernel made its appearance, there was a project named 386BSD, one which delivered a working system, which lost traction due to the fact that development was restricted to just the two people who started it and kept it going. Linux has largely grown due to its inclusiveness, the openness to contributions from any Tom, Dick or Harry, provided they meet technical standards. But then the human race, Sun Microsystems personnel included, rarely learns from experience.Featured Whitepaper
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Project Indiana is headed by Ian Murdock who started the Debian GNU/Linux project in 1993 and led it for three years. After leaving Debian, Murdock started another distribution called Progeny based on Debian, but that shut shop after a while. People often have the perception that if one touch turns something into gold, then it works every time. Sadly, such is not the case. There has been some acrimony over the fact that Murdock's project seems to have appropriated the name OpenSolaris. So much so, that one well-known participant in the OpenSolaris project, Roy Fielding of Apache HTTP Server Project fame, quit in disgust earlier this year. He had this to say, in part: "What is the point of creating the OpenSolaris Community governance if the community isn’t even allowed to decide what is called OpenSolaris? This isn’t an abstract discussion of trademarks. It is the fundamental basis for making technical decisions of any kind for the project." Commenting on his departure, Emily Ratliff of IBM's Linux Technology Centre pointed out that until that point there had been 578 patches contributed to the OpenSolaris project, a rate of 0.6 patches a day. "Linus (Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel) gets more patches while he is brushing his teeth than OpenSolaris gets in a week. Despite Roy’s efforts to build a real community, contributing to OpenSolaris always has been and seemingly always will be, corporate welfare," she commented. And, she added: "For me, the realization (sic) that Sun just doesn’t get it, and never will, was crystallized (sic) the day I was turned away from an OpenSolaris Users’ Group meeting for refusing to sign an NDA." And now to the binary distribution, itself. The recent release (2008.05) from Project Indiana appears to be geared towards the business desktop but network connectivity is problematic. Then again, given the amount of eye candy, it cannot be geared towards the server. Network connectivity is possible if one allows the so-called Network-Magic utility to work and provides a DHCP server. Turn off the magic (which strongly reminds me of the brain-dead GNOME application Network Manager) and you can't get a connection. Sure, you can set a static IP but you'll still be isolated on the network. No internet for you, OpenSolaris user. |
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