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Story: Sun Microsystems' Unix Version May Trip LinuxTotal Replies: 3
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salparadise

Jan 05, 2005
8:19 AM EST 		Question "Why would anyone buy a paid version, when an operating system tested in mission critical situations is available for use free of cost, he asked."

Answer "Because they are not produced by SUN."
PaulFerris

Jan 05, 2005
8:30 AM EST 		I have to weigh in here and say that it will likely be a good thing for Solaris to go Open Source. It beats them not doing it.

On the other side, I find Solaris, in comparison to Linux especially, to be quite clumsy. Yeah, you can get some serious hardware if you need it, but from a usability perspective, it's simply not kept up with most enterprise Linux distributions -- like a lot of proprietary Unices, but moreso.

--FeriCyde
peragrin

Jan 05, 2005
10:13 AM EST 		Solaris is really good on Sparc. But it's x86 driver support is still really limited. By making the license not GPL compatible all those Linux drivers aren't going to help.

The only good thing is that those who will want Solaris can keep it. Even if Sun dies out.
sbergman27

Jan 05, 2005
10:50 AM EST 		At first I was a bit disappointed at the license being incompatible with GPL. However, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it makes much difference. Solaris and Linux are surely two very different OSes which both happen to implement a POSIX interface. I'm not sure how much cross-pollenation is really possible. If there are *ideas* that can be shared between the two OSes, that can be done without compatible licenses. But it seems like it would be best to write the actual code from scratch, anyway. Especially for things like drivers. Then again, I'm not in a position to know for sure.

EDIT: I should have qualified my statement about the license being GPL incompatible. They haven't officially announced a license yet. They are just working on getting a new license approved by OSI. With Sun, nothing is *ever* a definite. (At least not for long.)

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