Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

The ramblings of an Australian SaND TSC* Principal Field Technologist

* Solaris and Network Domain Technology Support Centre - The group I work for

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pageicon Thursday Apr 14, 2005

SCO Gives Sun Blessings to Open-Source Solaris

In September last year, SJVN quoted...

"Until we see what kind of licenses Sun is talking about and see what their plans really are, it's hard to say anything," SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said. "SCO is showing that it will fight for its Unix intellectual property rights with IBM, and I'm sure Sun sees that."

I guess that this article by the same journalist indicates that SCO got to see what we are doing and became reassured.

...during SCO's earning teleconference on Tuesday, CEO Darl McBride revealed that Sun had discussed with SCO its plans to open-source the Solaris operating system and that SCO has no problems with them.

"We have seen what Sun plans to do with OpenSolaris and we have no problem with it," McBride said. "What they're doing protects our Unix intellectual property rights."

There are some other interesting quotes in there.

Sun has slowly moved towards open-sourcing Solaris 10, or OpenSolaris, for over a year. To date, though, the only released components of OpenSolaris are programs, such as DTrace, which aren't parts of the operating system.

Actually, Dtrace is very much part of the operating system. If you download and have a look at it, you will see that a great proportion of it lives under usr/src/uts. Source code under here is what is used to build the kernel and the kernel modules.

Last fall, Sun officials maintained that the company had the appropriate intellectual property licensing rights to open-source Solaris.

Yes, we did, didn't we. Why is it the so many people won't take us at our word when we say things like that?

SJVN also mentions the Community Advisory Board announcement.

Anyway, that's one of the arguments that folks have been using against us doing the open sourcing that has been knocked on the head.

Unfortunately, things being as they are, and as James points out, we should now expect the hew and cry from the peanut gallery about how this proves that Sun is in cahoots with SCO and Microsoft to kill Linux.

Sigh.

I know that that there is an anti-Sun brigade out there who won't believe anyt hing that we say and will always believe that we have hidden motives based upon conspiricies. Unfortunately, there is little that we can do to change people who believe this kind of claptrap. About the best that we can do is to keep posting factually and let the more balanced folk make up their own minds.

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Posted at 02:41PM Apr 14, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[6]