Sun Freeware, Blastwave, Nexenta, Project Indiana ...
After I installed the official Solaris 10 (or nevada) bits on my box, my first thing to do is to add some missed GNU softwares. Besides building the source code by myself, I also usually install some pre-built packages. Such as sudo, gpatch, vim 7.0, Gnu Emacs, Exuberant ctags, QT3.x ... So, where to get them?
You can download the archived packages from www.sunfreeware.com. But you have to resolve the dependencies by yourself, and download all the required packages one by one. Besides that, some packages require the Gnu C/C++ runtime support. Then, I found www.blastwave.org, pkg-get could easily help you to install the packages as well as their dependencies, just like the apt-get.
Nexenta, which is called Gnu Solaris, made a step forward. It uses the Debian packaging system, and Gnu userland. But Nexenta is not solid stable, its installer is not so user friendly, no localization. And most softwares are built by gcc/g++.
Now, we have Project Indiana. It's really existing news. (When I first heard solaris would be opensource'd, I have the idea, Solaris Kernel plus Gnu software stack.) I only have two concerns for Project Indiana: which compilers would this project to use, GCC or SunStudio; which packaging system would be adopted, dpkg/apt-get or a SVR4 package back-end for apt-get? (If we decided to use SunStudio compilers, the compatibilities with GCC need to be improved. Porting a Gnu software written by C++ to Solaris with SunStudio, is painful.)
In terms of binary compatibilities, let's look at what the established enterprise and startups are using on servers today? The most used technologies maybe Java/JavaEE, AMP (Apache, MySql and PHP), Python, Ruby/Rails, Perl, DBMS (Oracle, DB2) , shell scripts... (C/C++ maybe the last ones in this list). I don't think the incompatibilities of tar and gtar would really bother them.
