Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

More on Martin Fink's Blog

Martin has corrected one misperception (which I'll mention later) and written a response to all of the commotion that his blog stirred up. I certainly hope that my response fell into the category of "thoughful criticism".

Martin, you mention that there were a few good questions, yet you didn't really address very many of them.

I'm am actually glad to see more folks getting in to the blogging arena, and it's good to see people writing their own text, regardless of other opinions. The discussion is everything. Thank you for the correction that you did make about the developer community, as you no doubtedly saw, you certainly hit a nerve with some people over that one.

As you asked for corrections to real errors, I am slightly disappointed that you overlooked a few that I pointed out.

The big one that I harped on is that you are under the mistaken impression that Solaris for SPARC, Solaris for x86 and Solaris for Opteron are all different beasts. They are not. Solaris is built from a single code tree (and has been done so for quiet a long time) When compared to the amount of common code, the architecture independant stuff does not really amount to a lot.

The license

There really is not any point on speculating about the license that will be used. We have given the commitment that it will be OSI compliant and Jonathan has spoken to the press about time frames. No-one outside of Sun and few people inside (certainly not me) have seen the contracts that outline exactly what we own, so speculation on what we can open source is also a moot point, save to say, that we'd look pretty silly with all of this build up if we then went for a license and governance model that was not truly open, and I for one do not like looking silly.

Janus

Indemnification is also a moot point. There is no linux kernel code involved. Janus is an implementation of the the public interfaces.

I wrote a lot more in my initial reply to your blog Martin. I'd be interested to see if you are prepared to correct what I perceive as errors, or at least enter into discussion about them.

Posted at 08:22PM Nov 29, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[8]

More on the timing of open-sourcing Solaris

In an article at Computerworld Patrick Thibodeau interviewed Jonathan about open-sourcing Solaris.

The article was titled Schwartz Says Solaris Can Be Completely Open-Source

There are some great "soundbites" in this interview.

What's the time frame for releasing open-source Solaris?

We will have the licence announced by the end of this calendar year and the code fully available [by the] first quarter of next year.

Well folks, that's the best timetable I've heard published publicly.

Some other good quotes.

Is there anything preventing you from making all of Solaris open-source?

Nothing at all. And let me repeat that. Nothing at all.

Here is the one that folks are so good at misquoting him on. The answer is pretty clear (well I would think so on reading it).

Is Solaris in competition with Linux?

No, that's like asking if Solaris is in competition with the open-source movement. Solaris is in competition with Red Hat. Solaris will be as much the open-source movement as anything else. The competition ultimately is going to be had and be seen between companies that have competitive offerings.

There are a few other good questins/answers in there, but why not simply head off to the article and read the whole thing?

Posted at 08:02PM Nov 29, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |