Solaris can never be Linux

By Sam Varghese
Sunday, 13 May 2007 23:00

Opinion and Analysis

The latest bit of spiel which juxtaposes these words comes from a credentialled person - but the words are extremely tired.

Ian Murdock has plenty of cred in the free and open source software community. This is the man who started the Debian GNU/Linux project and headed it for three years.

Murdock, now the chief operating systems officer for Sun, says he wants to make Solaris, the company's well-known Unix, more like Linux. One wonders why - people at Sun have for ages knocked Linux, saying that it is a poor cousin to the enterprise-capable Solaris. The word often used was "lightweight."

Yet now, the so-called heavyweight wants to mimic the lightweight. The company which once scorned open source, the General Public Licence (under which Linux is released) and anything to do with the free operating system is now actually looking to emulate it!

Eight 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 derivations - for a price. (bold correction - Thanks to Graham Tooley)

Things haven't changed much at Sun. When Sun launched its OpenSolaris project in 2005 it used the Common Development and Distribution Licence - which is incompatible withb the GPL - and some system code was not released.