NetBSD Announces Sun Hardware Donation 33
Jeremy C. Reed writes "NetBSD announced that Sun donated two machines running Solaris '[i]n order to support and further the development efforts of the NetBSD
Packages team, to promote the build of binary packages for Solaris 8,
Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 and to enhance the support of the Sun Forte
Compiler chain.' The NetBSD Package Collection can be used on many platforms beyond NetBSD
to provide an easy way to
consistently install third-party software and manage packages."
Sun Blade 1000 (Score:2, Informative)
This is how it should be done (Score:5, Informative)
This example shows how things should work when supporting any specific hardware/software combination. If you want something done, donate some time by making contributions, fixes, testing, helping out developers with information about the hardware, etc. Or donate money or hardware. Or help developers by giving access to the hardware (remote shell, test their fixes etc., whatever helps).
If nobody cares about support for a particular software/hardware combination, then what is lost? Software support for hardware that nobody uses anymore. Anything remotely popular will do just fine.
Apparantly Sun cares enough to throw some hardware at the NetBSD project. Good for them, and why not? Anyway, it's nice to see the NetBSD project helped out like this.
More than just hardware (Score:4, Informative)
From the announcement: "Sun also provided licenses for SunOne Studio 9"
That's plural, and each Studio 9 license retails for $2,995.00.
If there were several licenses, for example, this means the donation could be "worth" up to $10K or more. Sun Studio also comes with good documentation, a good debugger, run-time profiling and memory usage checking, etc. NetBSD could even use this for improving NetBSD itself, depending on their dev tool policies (Studio is not open source).
Re:Sun on the right track (Score:3, Informative)
- Hubert