Talk:OpenSolaris

Licensing Information

This article states that the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL, and gives a link to a wikipedia page listing free software licenses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FSF_approved_software_licences, however this page states that CDDL is compatible with GPL with no footnotes or other information given as conditionals. Mrsteveman1 10:43, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

I would like to add a comment to this section concerning why GPLv2 wasn't chosen:

One of the philosophical differences between the two licenses is that the CDDL allows the combination of open and closed components into a derivative work, an action not allowed under GPLv2.

Solaris contains some components that were not written by Sun^[1], and which whose owners (for whatever reasons) have kept proprietary. Since Sun could only release source code for the parts they owned, putting OpenSolaris under GPLv2 would have prevented the formation of derivative works that contain those closed components. And, without those closed components, the system would be incomplete - an undesirable situation for Sun and the new OpenSolaris community.
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[1] such as drivers...

As I am new to contributing to Wikipedia, I would appreciate suggestions and feedback before making this addition. Plocher (talk) 20:33, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

As this is contentious, this would need a reference (if there's a Sun press release or policy document that would do, but not a blog entry - perhaps unfortunate given Simon Phipps' preferred communication method). I'm not sure that "philosophical" is the best word either. Finally, it probably needs making clear that large portions of the OS are GPLed. JohnLevon (talk) 20:15, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any published policy/press release documents; as one who interacted with the launch effort from within Sun, this was accepted as a constraint, to the frustration of those who wished things were otherwise. Given the lack of formal documentation, it is probably sufficient to leave this conversation on the discussion page as context. As for "philosophical", it was the best of several alternatives that came to mind :-) Plocher (talk) 05:46, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Why is information about CDDL's GPL incompatibility even mentioned here? This is an article about OpenSolaris, not about the license it's released under. It should just link to the CDDL article and any information about it here that's not already covered by the CDDL article should be moved there. Dracker (talk) 13:27, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Untitled discussion

Please, add link to a timeline of builds.

After starting this article. I realized the name should be OpenSolaris rather than Opensolaris.

All fixed....let's try and get a bit more detail in here. - Ché

Thanks Pmsyyz for the cleanup, I'm new to Wiki so maybe I can learn formatting from you - Ché

Linus' comments (Beware rant)

I find Linus' comments childish and stupid, why should he care about other kernels and say they should die? Linus' should stop wasting his time saying such childish comments and work on making Linux as good, currently Solaris works better than Linux for a lot of things. And my opinion is Linus' should grow up and stop behaving as a baby. Who agrees? 220.233.48.200 15:32, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Snooze! What do you care who agrees when you didn't even have the class to create an account or log in to post your rant? In fact why do you care about who agrees with you? Who are you to say that Linus is wasting his time by expressing his personal opinion in response to some question that was posed to him? In fact why aren't you railing against the person who requested Linus' opinion on the subject? Linus' time is his own to waste but the person who posed the question to him was arguably wasting Linus' time. (Courtesy would demand that Linus posted some response to the question even if it was to express some desire not to be drawn into some flamewar). Personally I think you've wasted your time by posting this rant to the discussion page. However it's your time to waste. I've wasted my time on this response ... and that's my time to waste. Seeing a pattern here? JimD 19:04, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

BTW: You clearly don't understand Linus' sense of humor or you were deliberately picking a fight. The comment about "active competition" and hoping "they die" is clearly Linus' being facetious. I've heard him talk about similar things in person on a number of occasions and I can almost see the smirk and hear his tone of voice when I read that line. This is just like his comments about "world domination" a decade ago. He jokes about such things to mock the assumptions people make about his agenda. (Linux is getting popular so Linus must be thinking of world domination; Sun is opening the sources to Solaris so Linus must consider them to be competition that must be crushed as he rolls towards world domination ... etc). JimD

Actually, I don't find Linus' comments appropriate here either. It's not real critism, it's just trolling at best. It doesn't belong on Wikipedia unless they can be made NPOV-ish. Mike 10:29, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

As I commented last year (see below) I agree. I think they were the result of a journalist trolling. If, as JimD suggests, they are merely a humorous response to that trolling then I would be pleased to see them removed Webmink 13:19, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Am not so sure Linus was being facetious. He probably does hope that opensolaris falls throught the crack and become a hobby project for a few greying hackers. The key, though, is that he is one of the authorities on making open-source software that grows beyond wild expectations, and as such his opinion does bear relevance to opensolaris. His comment about driver issues was spot-on. Christopher Mahan 15:41, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

He was CLEARLY being humourous. In fact, i could bet 100000$ that after Linux made that comment, he probably chuckled. Granted, it's not "real" criticism, but it is indeed valid enough, as it actually DOES represent what most people think the negative aspects of opensolaris are. Liquidtenmillion 23:50, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

CAB

What will the role of the CAB be? The article doesn't mention this. Lupin 16:42, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The first thing the CAB will do is create a Charter and Governance for itself, so your question really can't be answered until it has met for the first time. --Webmink 10:10, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

STUB

Does anyone really think this article should be stubbed, seriously there's not much we can say about OpenSolaris until we have the code, I think what is here is a fair and informative representation of the current situation.

I agree. I'm actually a CAB member and will be doing my best to keep the page up to date; right now I think there is little that could be added and hence it is not a stub. --Webmink 01:47, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Sources

I'm not sure the Torvalds comments are very helpful here, especially without a citation. --Webmink 12:30, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Citations have been added. Christopher Mahan 22:47, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Does this sound like PR?

Does anyone else think that the article reads like it was written by Sun simply for PR purposes? I'm not saying it actually was, but it seems a bit filled with marketing-oriented jargon and the like, i.e. "The community's core values -- openness, inclusiveness, respect, honesty, quality, and independence -- are reflected in how the community and its leaders behave and help guide the community as it evolves the technology." -anonymous

Yes very much so.

Yes. It should be overhauled. The language is too gushy. One big question I have is can you have a working, bootable, useable version without using any components released under a non-CDDL license (i.e. the OpenSolaris Binary License, which is not F/OSS)? If not, the article should mention this. --NightMonkey 12:13, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. And as NightMonkey added, there is a dependency to Solaris Express Community Release, which may contain proprietary code. Christopher Mahan 16:51, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Infobox

I've edited a lot of things out of the new infobox that were erroneously copied from the Solaris article -- including the screenshot, since strictly speaking it's not of OpenSolaris, but of Solaris 10. (There's no such thing as "Open Solaris 10"). I also removed "Latest stable release" since what was there were the dates for Solaris 10, but also because I'm not sure what constitutes a stable release date / version number for the OpenSolaris project.

On Portal:Free software, OpenSolaris is currently the selected article

(2007-02-28) Just to let you know. The purpose of selecting an article is both to point readers to the article and to highlight it to potential contributors. I'm hoping this will attract some contributors to this important article. It will remain on the portal for a week or so. The previous selected article was CUPS. Gronky 15:40, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

The selected article box has been updated again, OpenSolaris has been superceded by MediaWiki. Gronky 18:55, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Project Indiana?

"Project Indiana" links to the OpenSolaris entry, but there is no further mention of it :-/ 84.143.158.87 10:50, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, that's goofy. But more importantly, the article needs to be updated to mention that OpenSolaris (as of not too long ago) is now a BINARY distribution as well. This came as a result of Project Indiana. 134.48.137.11 1 November 2007 (UTC)

GNU/OpenSolaris

I've just noticed that a lot of references to this OS inside the community use the term "GNU/OpenSolaris". I think this is a great step - very friendly to acknowledge the GNU contribution. Any comments on how it should be mentioned in the article? --Gronky (talk) 20:57, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

I think this will be pretty much self-directed by the citations you choose.--NapoliRoma (talk) 15:29, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

It's probably a matter of what a specific distribution uses for its userland. Schillix is based on Sun/AT&T code for the most part, while Nexenta is based on Debian; the combined label would apply to the latter, but not the former. (I wouldn't think the use of GCC as a build environment would require the label, as it's really more a matter of necessity since Sun's compilers remain closed source.) Haikupoet (talk) 14:58, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Screenshot

reqscreenshot

Done. ffm 23:44, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

The current screenshot is out of date. Shouldn't it be replaced with a screenshot of the new (and very different looking) Indiana release? I don't know how to update it myself, but a suitable image is located at http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/ Dracker (talk) 13:44, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

updated it myself Dracker (talk) 13:11, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

All external links have to be removed from the body

Folks, this isn't a project homepage and it isn't a web portal. It's an encyclopedia article.

Web links are ok in the "External links" section, and are ok as references (which makes them appear in the "References" section), but they can't stay in the body of the article. I've already removed all such external links from the FSF article. I'll come back and do this article soon, but I'm no expert on OpenSolaris's community, so someone else might be able to do a cleaner job. If you think you can, then please give it a go before I do. --Gronky (talk) 10:15, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Split OS and project/community

I just realised why this article's scope and topic is so unclear: it's trying to be both an article for the free software operating system and an article for Sun's project to build a community. The GNU article had this problem a few years ago, so it was split into GNU operating system and GNU project. Maybe this should be similarly done here and let OpenSolaris be an operating system and let OpenSolaris community be a community/project. --Gronky (talk) 10:22, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure if there's all that much confusion in the article as it stands, and I think currently the proportions are the other way 'round -- as far as I can tell, right now the article is almost all about the community project except for two sentences about Ian Murdock and Project Indiana.

Today "OpenSolaris" is the project and there are various distros based on it under other names, such as Nexenta. It does look like at some point there will be a specific distro named "OpenSolaris", but there doesn't appear to be much more than two sentences' worth of material about it right now, which doesn't seem like enough to justify a split today.--NapoliRoma (talk) 16:52, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree that the article is almost all about the community project. That's what's confusing. I came here looking to read about an operating system, and there's an infobox indicating this is about an operating system, but I'm quickly told about how many accounts have been made at a website.

If this article is about the community, then let it be about that, but we should have an article about the operating system too. It could be at OpenSolaris (operating system). --Gronky (talk) 09:34, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Marketing

I whole article reeks of the stench of marketing material. This is nothing against OpenSolaris developers, but more about Sun itself. Compare the wording of this and Sun's marketing material, and you will see parallels in the terminology where Sun's marketers want to insert certain ideas into our minds. A dead giveaway is the "technology" following each mention of "Solaris." It's almost cult-like. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.234.228.206 (talk) 15:05, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. While I like Sun they sometimes seem a bit hubristic with regards to their own credibility. Linguistically conflating the project to create an OS with the OS itself may be good branding but it is not encyclopedic. Any other tech company would limit PR to the press releases; a bit like Apple, Sun seem to think that their PR is somehow genuinely philosophical and connotes a uniqueness of vision. But its hard to see what is at all truly unique here. It can all be expressed in standardized terminology. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.105.244.93 (talk) 01:47, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Absolutely. This article needs to be rewritten, partially to remove the marketing wording and partially to update it now that there is an official release Dracker (talk) 13:47, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Images

The screen shot looks very different from the opensolaris.com live cd. I suppose the current screen shot is either outdated, a developer edition or largely modified. It would be more appropriate to have a screen shot showing the current default desktop. The article could also use the logo image. I wonder, if it falls under fair use. Ubuntu article does this right. --Easyas12c (talk) 14:45, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

I've added the logo. Andareed (talk) 04:51, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

I've updated the screenshot Dracker (talk) 13:11, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Vendor

Who's a vendor that has picked up this project like Dell to Ubuntu? Was it Toshiba? Or who? I don't see it in the article, but I know it has occurred.

Does OpenOffice run under OpenSolaris?

I would like to test OpenSolaris. Can anyone tell me if or if not OpenOffice works with OpenSolaris? --84.56.237.2 (talk) 05:56, 14 April 2009 (UTC)