Sun Considers dual-sourcing Solaris Under GPL3 198
foorilious writes "In his blog, Sun Microsystem's President and COO Jonathan Schwartz discusses the possibility of dual-licensing Solaris (and perhaps the rest of their software suite) under GPLv3, in addition to the CDDL, which is the OSI-approved license under which these products are already available, but generally considered to be incompatible with the GPL at some level.
Though this could mean an opening of the floodgates to a lot of sharing between Linux and Solaris (among other things), it's worth mentioning that Schwartz has speculated on exciting things in the past (such as porting Solaris to IBM's Power) that we subsequently never heard another thing about."
Floodgates are shut (Score:5, Informative)
Though this could mean an opening of the floodgates to a lot of sharing between Linux and Solaris
Linus already said that Linux is not now, and will not in the near future, be released under GPLv3. And since GPLv3 is not reverse compatible with GPLv2 (it has more restrictions), this won't happen.
Patents in GPL3 (Score:5, Informative)
Solaris on Power (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who cares about Solaris? (Score:2, Informative)
If you want "GPL Java", why not help out with GNU Classpath [gnu.org]. Progress has been nothing short of spectacular in recent months, and more volunteers are always welcome.
It's already available. (Score:1, Informative)
There are SableVM, JamVM, GCJ, and many others. Along with GNU Classpath and Jikes, you've got a rather complete J2SE implementation available to you. GCJ can compile to native code on certain platforms. Even with all the talk about JIT compiled code potentially being faster than native binaries (due to runtime optimizations and so forth), many people have found that code compiled with GCJ is far faster than when executed under a Java VM.
Re:So uh... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Will Sun Shine? (Score:2, Informative)
I personally only hope that whatever becomes of the GPL3 deal gets Solaris 10 the credit it deserves. For mostly historical reasons, Solaris doesn't enjoy the great "buzzword" media hype that Linux gets, though it dominates Linux in many areas - geeky-techno-media-lust is not one of those areas.
For those asking for Java open-sourced, I don't see how that will help the big picture. Linux is open source and look how many different versions do things their own way. How many different binary formats must we have to run on the different Linux boxes with full dependency checking? What a mess. Some control on the direction of Java is a good thing as Java will remain consistent!
Re:Who cares about Solaris? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So uh... (Score:1, Informative)
We have GNU/Linux.
We have GNU/*BSD.
Does this mean that GNU/Solaris is surely to come?
Wouldn't that be GNU/SunOS, since the underlying kernel is still referred to as SunOS? Just like there is a GNU/Darwin, not GNU/OSX.
ex:
% uname -a
SunOS thedude 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Re:Sharing with Linux? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Horses, Loaves and Shoes. (Score:5, Informative)
Fast forward to today linux is losing out to Macs in science, every conference I go to it seems that more and more people have Powerbooks (like > 50% of the audience), especially at NASA. My project just decided to move entirely over to Macs. Solaris isn't even in the mix anymore.
Solution, Seeks Problem... (Score:4, Informative)
So really what it would allow a person to do, is produce a GNU/Solaris as opposed to GNU/Linux -- an OS that would have the Solaris kernel, wrapped in the GNU utilities, without the Linux kernel. I'm not sure if anyone would really want that, because I'm not sure that it would be compatibile with either existing Solaris or existing Linux software without rewriting, and it generally seems to be a solution looking for a problem (not unlike GNU/Hurd).
Re:Horses, Loaves and Shoes. (Score:3, Informative)
However in the US, where Macs are cheaper than in the UK and computing budgets are more reasonable, Macs are starting to win out. I work on a NASA mission at a University and personally have a Dual G5 workstation. The Astronomy department here is moving to entirely Macs, and my project is too (currently we only have 3 G5's in the building, but after the next budget cycle that will most likely double). Trust me ther e is a lot of serious work going on here using Macs!
The main reason for this is that Macs are easier to administer, easier to use and run Microsoft Office. Use of Office is much more prevalent in US research I find, so much so that many people I work with have Windows laptops and Linux workstations. With Macs they can do everything on one machine.
The last conference I went to as I said, at least 50% of people had powerbooks. Everyone who worked at NASA/GSFC had a Powerbook.
Re:Horses, Loaves and Shoes. (Score:2, Informative)
The general feedback is that it is as fast or faster as Linux on the same hardware, you can get it for free and use it without having to go something like the Fedora route and if you do want support it is cheaper than Linux.
Re:Will Sun Shine? (Score:2, Informative)
One of the design goals for Solaris 10 was for it to be not more than 5% slower than Linux for a range of single processor workloads where typically in the past Linux had been faster (on the same hardware). To that end Sun developed a benchmark called LibMicro which modeled the workloads which Solaris underperformed at and gave this to the Solaris 10 kernel developers as a way of measuring how far they were from their goal.
Most of the benchmarks that have been published show that they have done a pretty good job with Solaris delivering very similar performance to Linux on the same hardware for single CPU workloads and generally outperfoming Linux on SMP workloads.
There are some areas where Solaris anhilates Linux, give Solaris 10 a TCP heavy workload and it will easily outperform Linux. This may also no apply to UDP as well.
To give you an example of how close Solaris is to Linux on single CPU tests the SPECjbb results for a AMD based x2100 are 15434 for SLES 9 64bit and 16070 for Solaris 10 64bit