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.
____
[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)

Moreover, napp-it is not a derivative, it is barely a web interface framework written in Perl and meant to run/configure/manage SXDE or Nexenta, not unlike Webmin, but with a strong focus on Solaris features and tools (ZFS, etc...). Jwarnier (talk) 18:43, 12 February 2010 (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.

It truely needs some expansion. Toshiba sell Notebooks with Opensolaris and Fujitsu is making their super-computers on Sparc and Opensolaris. Minikola 20091120, 11:45AM CET (GMT+1) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Minikola (talk • contribs) 10:50, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

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)

Yes, it does -- see http://www.gnome.org/~gman/opensolaris-whats-new/ . --NapoliRoma (talk) 06:25, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes. OpenOffice was actually based on StarOffice which was originally a commercial product made by sun (which was obviously therefore designed to run on sun systems) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.36.93.46 (talk) 16:02, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, not quite true, as Sun bought off a company called StarDivision which created StarOffice, and it was already running on Solaris before Sun bought it. But Sun Open-Sourced it and the base was baptised OpenOffice, then OpenOffice.org because of legal matters. Jwarnier (talk) 16:38, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Legal status

While this quote is relevant, perhaps there could be an explanation or some context for it? What does this quote mean for the legal status? 129.33.49.251 (talk) 21:40, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Nobody knows. Thats the point.81.23.50.232 (talk) 09:09, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Criticism section

The entire criticism section does not have a very encyclopedic tone. While I can tell it was written to show both sides, it comes off as ranty. It also cites no sources. If I knew more about the subject, or I would work on it, but I was on the page to learn about it myself. --Mintrepublic (talk) 06:33, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Previous comment is for Criticism section that is removed. I added new Criticism section about security updates for Opensolaris, regarding release editions from Sun. Minikola, 20. November 2009, 11:43 AM —Preceding unsigned comment added by Minikola (talk • contribs) 10:44, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's interesting that OpenSolaris Development Package Repositories claims "/release - contains stable packages normally updated once every six months after completing the release process including a final test cycle. Security and other high priority bug fixes can be made as needed. This is the primary user repository." and the 2008.11 release notes claim "The release repository is now the default authority for new users of OpenSolaris. This repository will be slower evolving, receiving milestone updates every 6 months with a new release of OpenSolaris. Significant bug fixes, security updates and new software may be provided, prior to these milestone updates, that users may install." and the 2009.06 release notes link to that, but no security updates have ever been made, leaving 2009.06 with the vulnerable Firefox 3.1b3. Their only out is the fact it says may, but it's still not good practice. TRS-80 (talk) 11:41, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I have wiped the section out. For it to be appropriate on Wikipedia a credible source needs to criticize OSOL/Sun for it and then what that source says can be used. The current section is criticism from an author who uses Sun's documentation as sources (rather than sources of actual criticism), which is inappropirate on Wikipedia due to it constituting original research. There is also neutrality problems and Veracity problems. ♣ Ameliorate! 10:31, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree that in the form it was, the criticism comes across as very fanboy-ish (see WP:SYNTH) and very unencyclopedic in tone (WP:NPOV). If the only "criticism" that can be made about OpenSolaris is that the Sun website says "updates every six months" but some third-party software betas are vulnerable on it, you're grasping at straws. Not oppose to a future criticism section which properly written however, containing criticism that is found in WP:RS. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 14:25, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Opensolaris.org is main site, together with opensolaris.com

I think there should be www.opensolaris.org on the top description of the page. Opensolaris it community-driven as much as Oracle-driven project and everyone I ast is saying that www.opensolaris.org And www.opensolaris.com are both official main project pages and they deserve to be displayed. Moreover, opensolaris.org is more "official one" to anyone actually using Opensolaris so not only developer page but basically main page por Opensolaris. (As operating system distribution asd well as for kernel)Minikola (talk) 12:19, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree and lend my support. Ismouton (talk) 14:21, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Кoolabsol, for putting back opensolaris.org as also main page for Opensolaris. ;) Minikola (talk) 14:28, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Hi, I changed the home page to www.opensolaris.org and put an indication that the page redirects. Linuxtinkerer (talk) 03:08, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Removal of the legal section

I removed this section since it is irrelevant to OpenSolaris. The initial agreement was never fully disclosed and Novell received compensation during the case settlement specifically linked to SCO's agreement with Sun. Moreover, now that the merger with Oracle is complete means that the due diligence done by Oracle's legal counsel considered Sun's ownership of the entire source code of Solaris and OpenSolaris as well as it's re-licensing valid. BlanchardJ (talk) 23:44, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Unix or Unix-Like

OpenSolaris is not a Unix certified system. It however follows the Unix standard but never got tried for approval by Sun or Oracle (Yet). BlanchardJ (talk) 23:17, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

However, it appears that the OS family category in the infobox is meant to refer to the system's pedigree, rather than SUS compliance and trademark certication status. Notice that BSD is also "Unix", as are a number of systems that were never certified or predate certification. 98.140.245.86 (talk) 04:07, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

BSD itself predates the Unix specification and is then considered a Unix for the sake of historical classification. If you check the BSD descendants like FreeBSD they are categorized as Unix-Like however, which is still considered a mild trademark violation. While I agree that many of those systems are part of the Unix family there is not much we can do without being in violation of the Open Group trademark. BlanchardJ (talk) 14:44, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

The modern meaning of Unix is simply an OS that has been certified by the Open Group. All the modern BSDs despite both being descended from the original codebase and being completely compatible with the Unix standard are typically classified as Unix-like. Why should OpenSolaris stand out? Ismouton (talk) 18:03, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

According to your definition of Unix not even UNIX System V Release 4 or UNIX 4.4BSD would qualify as ‘Unix.’ (Note that the Wikipedia articles on UNIX System V and BSD similarly categorize them as Unix, even though both wouldn’t qualify according to your narrow definition.) In any case, even if we were to go with your somewhat arbitrary definition, Solaris 10 is listed on The Open Group’s Web site; the last stable release of OpenSolaris is Solaris 10, just with the Oracle branding and logos removed (as well as some proprietary user-level/application software that doesn’t affect standards compliance). If you’re still skeptical, see standards(5) (man standards in Solaris/OpenSolaris), which should clear up any residual confusion you might have. In any case, kudos for your proofreading and fact-checking efforts! 71.246.150.178 (talk) 09:26, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

"spork"?

What is a software "spork" as opposed to a fork? Please explain. -- 77.7.155.77 (talk) 14:10, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Why has the article been converted into something missleading?

OpenSolaris is the basic OS and definitely not the name of a distribution.

Sun confused people by renaming the project "Indiana" into OpenSolaris against the will of the community.

There is no need to let this confusion take power over the WP article. The article should just mention the Sun initiated confusion.

OpenSolaris is not discontinued, it is still alife by the community. There is just no longer a distro that uses the name also to confuse people. --Schily (talk) 10:05, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

External links modified

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• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20120224073441/http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=121181 to http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=121181
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20091017002900/http://www.opensolaris.org:80/os/community/power_pc/ to http://opensolaris.org/os/community/power_pc/
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20090825162814/http://opensolaris.org:80/os/project/systemz/ to http://opensolaris.org/os/project/systemz/
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20091016061205/http://opensolaris.org:80/os/project/osarm/ to http://opensolaris.org/os/project/osarm/
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20091004094537/http://opensolaris.org:80/os/project/mips/ to http://opensolaris.org/os/project/mips/
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20110722111045/http://jaris.jp/index2.html to http://jaris.jp/index2.html
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20150520181014/http://www.nexenta.org/os/DownloadMirrors to http://www.nexenta.org/os/DownloadMirrors
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20111126232007/http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5910900226352217932 to https://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5910900226352217932
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20111126235552/http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2045707288429324613 to https://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2045707288429324613

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