TAG | OpenSolaris: nice try, pity about the licence |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 27 May 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 It's difficult to figure out why Sun has left out OpenOffice.org from this release. What is the point of having a tab titled Office on the list of programs - and then providing just a document viewer in this subset?The software management tool is a poorly designed and implemented application, and the number of packages available for inclusion is pathetically small compared to what a Linux distribution offers. But the licence is what jars the most. It pops up in all its glorious detail right at the start of proceedings, the Community Development and Distribution Licence. It isn't compatible with the General Public Licence, an indicator, again, that Sun is still in two minds - should we (really) give it away or should we still continue to be control freaks? Let's remember that nine years ago, one of the founders of Sun, software legend Bill Joy, used to go around promoting Sun's Community Source Licence (SCSL) as an alternative to the GPL. The difference? The GPL requires that all alterations to code be released into the public domain if it is going to be distributed while the SCSL allows licensees to release binary-only derivatives - for a price. This isn't the first time that Sun has toyed with creating an Unix-based desktop aimed at business users. It put out something called the Java Desktop System in 2004 - though why a modified version of what was then SuSE Linux, which included a few small Java applets, merited that name still isn't clear. The first release that I received was not installable and I had to return it to Sun, advising them that a review at that stage would be a major PR disaster for the company. A few months later, a working release was sent to me. That system is no longer available; components which bear the same name now sit atop the Solaris operating system and are marketed to businesses; the JDS component is free, Solaris costs an arm and a leg. There are two Sun components that would be of interest to Linux developers if they were licensed under terms that made them portable - the ZFS filesystem and DTrace. But by the time Sun decides on whether it will open source these two, it may be time for me to bid goodbye to this world. Or it could well be that Sun's own demise predates my own.
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